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CHARLES WILLIAM WASON

COLLECTION

CHINA AND THE CHINESE

THE GIFT OF
CHARLES WILLIAM WASON
CLASS OF 1876
1918

DS 508.C69"" """"""" '-'""'^

■"le West in the East from an American po

3 1924 023 271 442

Cornell University
Library

The original of tiiis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023271442

BOOKS BY PRICE COLLIER

Pdblished by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

England and the English .... net $1.50
The West In the East . (postage extra) net l.SO

THE WEST IN THE EAST

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

THE WEST IN THE EAST

FROM

AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

BY

PRICE COLLIER

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : 1911

Copyright, 1911, by
Chaeies Soribnbr's Sons

Published May, 1911

Co
MY WIFE, KATHARINE

TO WHOSE SOUND CEITICISM AND KINDLY PEEONG A

RECENT VOLUME OWES THE QUALITIES FOR

WHICH IT WAS CHIEFLY COMMENDED

INTRODUCTION

Much ridicule is dealt out to the author who
writes of a people, and a country, which he has
visited for only a short time. On the other
hand, it is the universal and sound opinion that
the history of an individual, or of a nation, can
only be written impartially by one who stands
apart, and at a distance, and whose impressions
and opinions are not smothered by details or
prejudices.

"My wanderings in the East have been spread
over ten years, but what one gains in insight
during a long stay one loses in the power of con-
veying. The most illuminating books on India
have been written by people who pass through
seeing everything with a fresh eye," writes Ed-
mund Candler; and what he writes of India
might well be supported by the evidence of such
writings as those of Ford, De Amicis, Dawson,
Hammerton, and others.

vii

viii INTRODUCTION

This is not by way of being a defence of my
own audacity in this and other volumes, but
an explanation.

I imagine that a writer who knew the Rev.
Mr. Skeat's dictionary by heart would cease to
write, and die of verbal suffocation. He would
know so much of words, that he would deem
them too dangerous to handle. A little knowl-
edge may be a dangerous thing, but too much
knowledge is often exile from activity. They
were right in the Garden of Eden.

A year's travel may mean many years of pre-
liminary study, steadied and corrected by ob-
servation. I permit myself to say as much for
the following pages.

I regret that the list of the names of those
who, by their friendliness and hospitality, have
made even these slight sketches in the East
either possible or profitable is too long to give.
I might be accused, too, of gilding the frame of
my picture over much. Edward Fitzgerald was
much bored one evening in the smoking-room
of a certain house in the country by the familiar
talk about people of title. He said good-night
and left the room. A few minutes later he put
his head in at the door, holding his candle in his

INTRODUCTION ix

hand, and said in a solemn voice: "I knew a
lord once, but he is dead now!" I should be
sorry to offer such another opportunity at my
study door.

Fortunately, those who gave me letters, and
those who honored them, and many hosts be-
sides, are not of a class who look to the mention
of their names for the assurance of my feeling
of gratitude and indebtedness. The book, such
as it is, is theirs, and with it go my apologies to
them for its un worthiness.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. On the Wat to the East . . l

II. The Gatewat to India ... 46

III. The Great Mughal .... 92

IV. From Mughal to Briton . . 135
V. Religion and Caste in India . 192

VI. His Highness the Maharaja . 240

VII. BuNiA— Pani 288

VIII. A Visitor's Diary 321

IX. John Chinaman and Others . 365

X. Japan 409

XI. Things Japanese, Korean, and

Manchurian 463

Conclusion 518

THE WEST IN THE EAST

I

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST

IT was less than a century ago that the sar-
castic question, "Who reads an American
book ? " was posed in the Edinburgh Review.
The Review was young, light-hearted, and care-
less of the feelings of others in those days. When
it was about to be issued, Sydney Smith sug-
gested as an appropriate motto the line from
Virgil: Tenui Musam meditamur avena, trans-
lating it: "We cultivate literature on a little
oatmeal!"

Nor Sydney Smith, nor any other Englishman
at that time, dreamed that well within the cen-
tury two books at any rate, by American au-
thors, dealing directly with the British Empire,
would be given a prominent place in the library
of every serious-minded Englishman. Captain
Mahan, of the United States Navy, and Mr.
Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard Univer-
sity, have written volumes that no Englishman
cares to neglect.

1

2 THE WEST IN THE EAST

What was playful condescension when the
question, "Who reads an American book ?" was
asked, has become a criticism of English patriot-
ism to-day, for no Englishman may pass by these
two books when he studies his own empire.

This marks a great change, but it is a change
that is often misunderstood. These books were
not written to instruct, or to counsel, the Eng-
lishman about his own affairs, but to serve as
commentaries for Americans, in the study of
their own internal and external affairs. There
is no suggestion of the smallest labial lapse in
the grandmotherly method with eggs, on the
contrary, it is a study of the old method, not a
hint that there exists a better of which we are
the inventors.

This newly awakened interest in the affairs of
Great Britain is not an attempt on the part of
the American to patronize the English. It is the
direct result of our colossal wealth, of our new
territorial responsibilities, and of our enforced in-
terest in the policies, affairs, failures, and suc-
cesses of the great empire. We can no longer
avoid this concern in the empire's affairs if we
would. It is not an impertinent nor an idle curi- '
osity and criticism, it is a new burden.

It is no longer a question of whether or no it
is an impertinence for an American to deal with

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 3

the British Empire; let me be frank, since I have
been guilty, and explain that I, at least, consider
it a necessity. It is our business, nowadays, to
know as much of the internal and external con-
ditions of the British Empire as possible, and to
study these conditions from an American point
of view for our own benefit, even if for no other
reason. Next to our own affairs, the affairs of
Great Britain are of most importance to us.

Should Great Britain lose India, lose the Suez
Canal, lose the supremacy of the sea, become an-
other Venice, Spain, Holland, or Denmark, the
one hundred million inhabitants of the United
States would find themselves with new and far
heavier burdens. We are no longer troubling
ourselves as to whether an American book will
be read, since it has become a patriotic duty for
the American who is blessed with the opportu-
nity, to study the social, moral, and economical
conditions of the very people who, less than a
century ago, good-naturedly laughed out the
question: "Who reads an American book?"
Times have changed; we have changed.

An intelligent public opinion about foreign
affairs needs fostering in America, for the time
is not far distant when America will need the
backing of knowledge, experience, and of the
travelled information of her wisest men, to meet

4 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the problems that are even now preparing for
her.

As an example, I might add, if I were not the
friend and admirer of both Mr. President Taft
and Mr. Ejiox, that uninformed diplomacy has
"dished" us in the East. The suggestion com-
ing from Washington, that the six great powers
should control together the railway situation in
northern and southern Manchuria, was received
coldly in St. Petersburg and in Tokio, and with
amused condescension in London, Paris, and
Berlin. I was in the East at the time, and at
more than one ambassadorial table it was not
easy to explain our motives. It is the sane and
the fair solution of a ticklish problem if we are
to have an open door in China, but as diplomacy,
as a means to an end, it was a lamentable failure.
It drove Russia and Japan together, and on the
fourth of July, 1910, an agreement was signed
between them, which provides for "friendly co-
operation with a view to the improvement of their
respective railway lines in Manchuria and the
perfecting of the connecting services of the said
lines, and to abstain from all competition preju-
dicial to the realization of this object."

In undiplomatic language this means hands
off in Manchuria, a sign to other powers to keep
of? the grass.

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 5

The Japanese are building at great cost a rail-
way bridge across the Yalu River, and a broad-
gauge railway from thence to Mukden. The
Russians control the Trans-Siberian Railway,
with a branch line from Harbin to Mukden,
which has thus far been operated at a loss.

This great valley, stretching up from the Gulf
of Pechili and the Gulf of Liao-tung for hundreds
of miles, only needs improved agricultural ma-
chinery and cheap labor, which is at hand, to
develop into a grain-growing territory equal to
the feeding of all Japan.

If Mr. Knox had been with me on my tortuous
and tiresome journey through this fair land, he
would not have dreamed of suggesting that Japan
and Russia should share these Chinese spoils
with other countries, or admit a participating
influence in a land watered by their blood, and
into which they were pouring money.

A suggestion to us from France and Russia on
the fourth of July, 1776, that they should share
in our hardly won opportunity, would have been
considered by us as fantastical as was the pro-
posal of Mr. Knox by Russia and Japan.

We have by this agreement between Russia
and Japan not only closed the door on ourselves,
but we have put England in a difficult position.
We have done even more than that. We have

6 THE WEST IN THE EAST

made it still easier for Japan to gobble Korea/
though she is pledged not to do so, and to turn
her attention to the consolidation of her recent
conquests and to the Pacific. Japan need no
longer be uneasy in the East, and both Russia
and Japan may now turn their eyes to matters
of more serious import to them. Russia becomes
free again to study the situation in India and the
Persian Gulf; and Japan may become less suave
in contemplating the exclusion of her citizens
from Australia, the Philippines, San Francisco,
and Vancouver.

As a diplomatic move this affair was as ill-con-
sidered and as embarrassing in its consequences
as can well be imagined. If Mr. Knox had been
in the employ of the Japanese government he
could not have aided them more successfully.

Our government was probably not kept in
touch with the situation in the East. Our de-
plorable system of choosing men to act as our
diplomatic and sensitive antennae abroad, be-
cause they have been successful in the manip-
ulation of ward, city, or state voters at home,
will ere long, and fortunately, bankrupt itself.
Whether the reward-seeking politician likes it or

^ This was written before the recent annexation of Korea by the
Japanese. When I was in Tokio and in Seoijl, I was told solemnly,
by officials of high standing, that there was no intention of annex-
ing Korea.

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 7

not, we must soon begin to appoint men who are
travellers, linguists, and more or less socially ac-
complished, if we are to hold our own, or even to
know what is going on in Europe and in the East.

Such commercial, industrial, and financial dis-
turbances as are now our lot in America, are due
to some extent to the fact that our productive
powers along many lines are now greater than
the demands of home consumption. Our agents
abroad, whether ambassadors, ministers, or con-
suls, have the new burden of blazing the way for
an increase of our foreign trade. The best men
that we can get for such posts will find compet-
itors from Germany, Belgium, England, France,
and Japan, well worthy of their steel.

I have not only spent a year in the Far East,
but I have also been for a short visit to South
America. I cannot say too much to my fellow-
countrymen of the successful labors of the new
type of men who are gradually, but all too slowly,
being tempted into our diplomatic and civil ser-
vice. I have seen many of them now all over
the world, men who are making this work their
profession, men who speak and write the lan-
guage of the country they are sent to, and men
who can speak and write their own, men who
represent the United States worthily. I have
also seen the less worthy and seen at close

8 THE WEST IN THE EAST

quarters the harm they do. I regret that I must
forbear to mention names, but if the people of
the United States knew what I know of the mere
dollar and cents gained for them, to mention
nothing else, by the better-class men of our new
civil service, and by the men representing us
these days in the great capitals, they would wreck
the reputation of any man, or any party, which
attempted to revert to the spoils system in the
appointment of our civil servants abroad. It
should be considered a misdemeanor to appoint
men to these posts in payment of services ren-
dered to persons or parties at home. I take it
that the accomplished and scholarly Mr. Knox
knows this already, and he could spare his fellow-
countrymen unnecessary humiliation if he would
always act upon it.

At the beginning of the last century the West
Indies were responsible for one-fourth of all
British commerce. The sugar of the West Ind-
ian Islands, and the colonies of Spain, were in
those days what the valleys of Manchuria and
the Eastern question are to-day. Great Britain
was our rival at our own doors. To-day she has
practically withdrawn her fleet from the Carib-
bean Sea.

It is acknowledged by everybody except per-
haps Germany, that the Monroe doctrine is not

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 9

a theory, but a fact, with a fleet behind it. We
have undertaken to do justice, to keep the peace,
and to safeguard property in South America,
largely through the good will of the various
states there. We do this, for their benefit and
for our own, lest any nation should make it an
excuse for the use of force in that region, that
order is not preserved there, and that therefore
their citizens and their property need protec-
tion. This method of opening the door to a for-
eign military power has been so successful along
these same lines elsewhere, that we cannot afford
to give the smallest excuse for such an argument.
Thai is the pith of the Monroe doctrine, and
what foreign nation has not adopted it, and
fought for it in some part of the world ? The
actual words of President Monroe were: "As a
principle in which the rights and interest of the
United States are involved . . . the American
continents . . . are henceforth not to be con-
sidered as subject for future colonization by any
European power. . . . We owe it, therefore, to
candor and to the amicable relations existing be-
tween the United States and those powers to de-
clare that we should consider any attempt on
their part to extend their system to any portion
of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace
and safety."

10 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Americans must accept the responsibilities of
the new situation whether they like them or not.
They may not shirk the trust imposed upon
them, whether for the present or for posterity.
By our control in Cuba and Porto Rico, by the
building of the canal, by the assertion that the
whole of the South American continent is more
or less within our sphere of influence, and by the
taking over of the Philippines, we have made
ourselves, to some extent, responsible for what
goes on in the East. The Washington dictum
of "no entangling alliances" is a thing of the
past. We cannot play the game single-handed.
We must have a partner or partners, and we
must look on at the game of Eastern politics
and policies, not only with interest, but with a
keen desire to know which partner to choose
when the time of choosing comes. Above, all we
should have diplomatic agents in the East com-
petent to advise us in such matters.

One of the best-informed students of Asian
questions. Sir William Hunter, wrote, just be-
fore his death: "I hail the advent of the United
States in the East as a new power for good, not
alone for the island races that come under their
care, but also in that great settlement of European
spheres of influence in Asia, which, if we could
see aright, forms the world problem of our day."

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 11

The inherited prejudices and quarrels of for-
eign-born, or of parent-foreign-born Americans,
must be swept up in the dust-pan of provin-
cial national housewifery and thrown away, that
America as a whole may profit. No man is
truly naturalized as an American who persists in
grafting his particular Old World enmities or
prejudices upon his new citizenship. Now that
we are taking part in the world game, no faction
in the body politic ought to be permitted to im-
pede our progress, to hamper our strength, or to
confuse our judgment.

Let Irishmen send funds to back a political
party in Great Britain; let Germans make pres-
ents to the German emperor; let Italians send
thousands in savings back to Italy ; let Poles hate
both Czar and Kaiser ; but let none of these en-
mities have the slightest bearing upon our foreign
relations or our foreign alliances. In them the
Irish must cease to be Irish, the Germans to be
Germans, the Italians to be Italians, and the
Poles to be Poles, and all must recognize their
fundamental citizenship, which is American.
America, with imperial tasks on her hands, can
recognize no tribes within her own borders,
among her own citizens.

It requires no long disquisition, and no argu-
ments more convincing than the mere state-

12 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ment of the facts, to show America's changed
position as regards the European and the East-
ern powers. Manila is forty-eight hours' jour-
ney from Hongkong, Japan's island of Formosa
is fifteen hours steaming from our island of
Luzon, and we have large sums invested in
Eastern trade, in Japanese bonds, and we are
preparing to assist in the building and in the con-
trol of a railway which will parallel a portion of
Russia's Trans-Siberian and Japan's Southern
Manchurian railways. Seventy-five miles from
Tokio, and at the extreme western point of
Japan, is a wireless telegraphy station at Choshi.
The steamer Korea when five hundred miles off
Hawaii communicated with Choshi, and now in
Japan they are planning to connect Choshi with
Hawaii by wireless, by increasing the motor
power at Choshi, which is now only fifty watts.
This makes Japan indeed very much our neigh-
bor. It may be added that Hawaii has, even
now, three Japanese to one American, and Peru
has a numerous colony of Japanese. Our great
wealth, our energy, and our policy of an open
door in China, force us to a participation in im-
perial affairs, though there are those in America
who, through geographical ignorance, or on ac-
count of parochial notions as to international
amenities, imagine that these enterprises can be

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 13

undertaken without ample provisions for a force
en sea and land to back up these pretensions.

The people of Oriental descent, and of
Oriental customs of life, number between
800,000,000 and 900,000,000, or more than
half the total population of the world. India
and China alone furnish, India 300,000,000,
and China 400,000,000, of this total popula-
tion. Their imports are estimated at some
$2,000,000,000 a year. The chief importers
are:

India $450,000,000

China 300,000,000

Japan 250,000,000

Hongkong 200,000,000

Straits Settlements 200,000,000

East Indian Islands 150,000,000

About one-third of this trade is between them-
selves, while roughly $1,400,000,000 comes chiefly
from Europe and the United States. Sad to re-
late, the American share is only about six per
cent, practically all the remaining ninety-four
per cent being supplied by Europe.

The chief imports of the Orient are cotton
goods to the value of $400,000,000, manufact-
ures of iron and steel, meat and dairy products,
medicine, drugs, and dyes, tobacco, leather, ag-
ricultural implements, vehicles for transporta-

14 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tion, and articles of household and domestic
use. The most important item is cotton goods,
of which Europe supplies ninety-seven per cent,
though it buys its raw material from the chief
cotton-producer of the world, the United States.

It is not our intention to neglect this commer-
cial opportunity. We have reminded both Eu-
rope and the East officially, on several occasions
of late, that we must be considered as having a
stake in the East, and that our claims and opin-
ions must be respected. In certain quarters at
home our assertion of claims and our assump-
tion of responsibilities in the East are looked
upon with dislike and with distrust. After many
months of travel and study in Europe and in the
East, an American looks upon this expansion of
interest and responsibility, not only with com-
placency, but with the feeling that it is unavoid-
able. Even if we were not in control in the West
Indies, and in the Philippine Islands, our posi-
tion as guardians of the Panama Canal, and
as sponsors for the safety from aggression of the
South American republics, and our position on
the Pacific Ocean, force us to play a part in the
East.

A nation, like an individual, must grow or die.
It is true that our first concern is with matters
at home. How a man will run, how he will

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 15

think, even, depends not a little upon the con-
dition of his heart. Our progress and prowess
in the East depend, as is the case with England,
upon our moral fibre at home.

There are two respectable and useful influ-
ences, of far-reaching importance in these days,
both in England and America, falling under the
general head of Social Reform, which are not
without portents and promises of evil in this
matter. One is a senseless and undiscriminat-
ing charity, whether backed by individuals or
ofiicially by the state; and the other is a weak-
ening of the willingness to accept responsibility,
to take charge, to govern, to work out along
big lines the national destiny, the latter being in
some sort a consequence of the former. The
Little Englanders, and those who oppose the
building of the canal, and a ship subsidy and a
powerful navy, are types of those who hang
back in England and in America. It is a symp-
tom of the weakening of the very finest char-
acteristics of the race.

The reader of the most elementary sketch of uni-
versal history can tell of the cessation of growth,
and then of the decay, of Bagdad, of Venice, of
Bruges, of Spain, Portugal, and Holland. France
is at the cross-roads now. Let the duties and re-
sponsibilities, and the wealth and its problems.

16 THE WEST IN THE EAST

come, problems by no means easy of solution,
and the individual and the nation which stands
up to them lives, or, shirking them for ease and
safety, dies! In spite of all that is preached by
the uninformed provinciality of the day, even by
respectable men such as Carnegie, a fierce fighter
for his own hand in other days, nothing is more
disastrous to civilization than purposeless Peace.
War against environment is the essential con-
dition of all life, whether animal, vegetable, indi-
vidual, or national. The cow and the lap-dog
are fruits of peace, useful and ornamental if you
like, but not sufficient, not ideal. The cow is
sacred in India, the lap-dog an idol in certain
houses, but they are not a protection worth con-
sidering.

"La guerre," wrote von Moltke, "est une in-
stitution de Dieu. En elle les plus nobles vertus
trouvent leur epanouissement. Sans la guerre le
monde se perdrait dans le materialisme." Joseph
de Maistre writes: "Lorsque I'ame humaine a
perdu son ressort par la moUesse, I'incredulite,
et les vices gangreneux qui sont I'exces de la
civilisation, elle ne pent etre retrempee que dans
le sang." I am not sure that both history and
experience do not prove him to be right. I re-
peat, I am not sure, but I am by no means an
advocate of war for war's sake, and I am con-

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 17

vinced that defencelessness in face of the armed
forces all about us is practically an invitation to
war.

He travels with eyes and ears sealed, who does
not become convinced that this century is not
concerned, as were the sixteenth and seventeenth
with religious struggles, as was the eighteenth
with the rights of man, as was the nineteenth
with questions of nationality. The twentieth
century even now is characterized by a strug-
gle for existence in the field of commerce and
industry. Peripatetic philosophers in caps and
blouses, or in white chokers, or deputations
of journalists, merchants, and members of Par-
liament, go and come, in the hope of deciding
whether there is a German peril, or a Japanese
peril. What could be more hopeless ? The rea-
son they are at sea is the simple one, that the
German peril and the Japanese peril are just as
much a fact as the law of gravitation.

The man who jumps out of a window falls to
the ground. No man who lives in the three di-
mensions of space, with which we are familiar,
can escape that law. No man who lives in Eng-
land and America can escape the vital necessity of
Germany and Japan to expand or to go to the wall.

The trouble has been and is, that we are
looking at the question as one of malice, of di-

18 THE WEST IN THE EAST

plomacy, of choice. It is nothing of the kind.
There is no blame, no right or wrong in the
matter. It is life or death, For Great Britain
and the United States, two nations already enor-
mously rich, it is simply a question of more
wealth. For Germany, for all Europe indeed,
and for Japan, it is a matter of life and death.

The phrase "Yellow peril," "German peril,"
"Japanese peril," is unfortunate, for the word
"peril" implies something terrible and immi-
nent. The situation exists, but, as I hope to
show later on in these pages, neither the "Yel-
low peril" nor the "Japanese peril" is imminent
nor of war-threatening danger to us in America,
unless we provoke it by exaggerated sentimen-
tality. I use the phrase because it is a familiar
one, but I disassociate myself from any advocacy
of nervous and self-conscious talk or action.

To talk of friendly Japan, or of friendly Ger-
many, however, is childish. No commercial rival
armed to the teeth is friendly.

Who knew in 1860 that Germany was soon to
be the dominant power in Europe ? Who knew
that she would defeat Austria in 1866 ? Who
dreamed in 1868 that in two years she would
crown her empei'or at Versailles ? Who dreamed
in 1888 that she was to be Great Britain's rival
on the sea .'' Certainly no Englishman cried

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 19

"Wolf" at the appropriate time. What Eng-
lishman to-day explains why Germany smashed
Denmark, humiliated Austria, ruined France,
defies England on the sea, squeezes Holland
commercially, and. backs Austria in tearing up
a treaty in order to make a grab in the Bal-
kans ? What childish nonsense to call this cry-
ing "Wolf"! It is an insult to that great power
not to admit that it is a very fine, full-grown
wolf, and just now very much on the prowl.
That is the fundamental factor to be remem-
bered in any discussion of this much-discussed
question. It is not to be wondered at that the
nations whose lives are at stake consider the
matter more seriously than nations which have
only pounds or dollars at stake.

Germany has a territory smaller than the State
of Texas, and a population of over 60,000,000,
and Germany can no longer feed herself. She
can feed herself for about two hundred and fifty
days of the year. What about the other one
hundred and fifteen days } That is the German
peril, and that, on a smaller scale, is the Japanese
peril, and to discuss the question as to whether
it exists or not, is mere beating the air. It is
not in the least an ethical problem, it is German
policy, it is Japanese policy, and in both cases
forced upon them, and war is sometimes an in-

20 THE WEST IN THE EAST

strument of policy. You can no more wall in a
nation, cramp it, confine it, threaten it with star-
vation, without a protest and a struggle, than
you can do the same to an individual. Whether
a man will fight for his life or not is not a ques-
tion, it is a fact. Japan has already given the
lie to our advocates of peace at any price in this
country by annexing Korea and occupying
Manchuria by force and in spite of our treaty
with Korea, one article of which reads: "If
other Powers deal unjustly with either govern-
ment, the one will exert its good oflBces, on be-
ing informed of the case, to bring about an
amicable arrangement, thus showing its friendly
feeling."

The reader will understand the situation bet-
ter with these comparisons at hand. The United
States has a population of about 28 persons per
square mile, Japan has a population of 317 to
the square mile, while Europe, with an area in
square miles not much larger than the United
States, has a population of 390,000,000, or a
density of 101 to the square mile. Great Britain
has a smaller area than Colorado and a density
of 470, while England alone has a density of 605.
Belgium is less than one and a half times as large
as Massachusetts, and has a density of 616.
Canada has a density of only 1.75. Italy is not

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 21

much larger than Nevada, but Nevada has less
than one person to the square mile, and Italy 293.
Rhode Island, our most densely populated State,
has a population of 407 to the square mile; next
comes Massachusetts with 348.

Neither Germany nor Japan has created or
fostered this situation. The mischief and the
malice begin when they are accused of what
they cannot help. But to say the situation does
not exist is ignorant, silly, or sentimental, de-
pending upon the person who speaks. Nor am
I putting words into the mouth of Germany
or Japan when I say that both Germany and
Japan must find outlets for their surplus popu-
lation ; I am only quoting such authorities as the
Prime Minister of Japan, and the distinguished
German historian Professor Hans Delbriick.

The interesting problem to put to oneself is,
how is the hydra-headed democracy in England
and America, easy-going and money-making, to
face Germany, governed by its wise men, and
Japan, now as much as a century ago, governed
by a group of feudal nobles, with the mikado,
who is not merely obeyed but worshipped by
the great mass of the Japanese, at their back.

I made bold, not long ago, to publish a serious
study of the internal and domestic situation in
England; and the following pages attempt to

22 THE WEST IN THE EAST

deal with the external and imperial relations of
Great Britain, because as Americans we are
vitally interested to know how soon, and to what
extent, we are to be involved in imperial mat-
ters in an even graver measure than now.

Great Britain, with its 11,500,000 square miles
of territory to protect, with its 400,000,000 of
people to govern, must necessarily invite the
scrutiny of Americans interested in the welfare
of their own country. One need hardly pay
heed to those foolish or sensitive persons who
look upon such scrutiny as an impertinence.

In 1907 the official figures show that the
United Kingdom purchased $900,000,000 of
food, drink, and tobacco in foreign countries;
$850,000,000 of raw materials and partly manu-
factured articles; $650,000,000 of manufactured
articles. Great Britain, with its population of
some 45,000,000 odd, is supporting foreign in-
dustries, and enriching foreign nations, ourselves
among the number, to the extent of $2,400,-
000,000 annually. Her self-governing colonies
bought foreign goods to the amount of $500,000,-
000, and her crown colonies to the amount of
$125,000,000. Plere is a customer who buys
over $3,000,000,000 worth of goods annually,
and yet cannot find sufficient employment at
home for her own people, who are emigrating

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 23

to other countries. Here is a customer who per-
sists in fooling himself with the behef that he is a
free trader, when his net receipts from customs
are $1,402,500,000 a year, and his net receipts
from excise are $1,514,000,000, or a total taxation
of food and drink amounting to $2,916,500,000.
In addition to this he has the highest, the most
costly, and the most pernicious tariff in the world
in his trades-unions, which put a tax on every
laborer's time and every laborer's hand and arm.
Men are only allowed to work so many hours, and
to produce so much. This is the tariff which is
ruining England slowly but surely. America is
really a free-trade country as compared with my
delightfully dull friend John Bull, who goes to
the extreme length of taxing time and taxing
energy, thus adding enormously to the cost price
of everything he sells, and thus building a tariff
wall against his own workmen in their attempts
to compete with the foreigner. It is the most
cruel of all forms of taxation.

British railways also add to this burdensome
tariff by declining to quote, as do German and
American railways, low rates for goods destined
for export. There is much criticism of Ameri-
can railway finance, but what should we think of
such a situation as the following ? A German
manufacturer can send goods from Hamburg

U THE WEST IN THE EAST

to Birmingham via London at a much less rate
than a London manufacturer can send goods di-
rect to Birmingham. Goods can be dehvered
in Birmingham from New York at a less price
than from Liverpool. The British manufact-
urer pays from twenty to thirty per cent higher
freight rates on goods sent to West Africa, South
Africa, Australia, and in many cases New Zea-
land, than do German or American shippers.
At any rate, this was the case as late as April,
1909. It is worth noting in this connection that
the railway rates in the United States are much
lower than anywhere else in the world. The
average railway rate per ton per mile in this
country in 1909, was 7.63 mills; and the rates on
the roads having great density of traffic, or
handling mainly cheap and bulky commodities,
are even lower. The, average rate per ton per
mile on all traffic of the Pennsylvania Railroad
is 6.3 mills; of the Illinois Central, 5.8 mills;
of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, 5.27
miUs; and of the Chesapeake and Ohio, 4.33
mills ; while the average rate per ton per mile on
the railways of France is 14 mills; and on those
of Germany, 13 mills.

The cost per mUe of American railways av-
erages $54,421; of the railways of the United
Kingdom, $273,438; of the German Empire,

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 25

$102,435; of France, $133,871; of Belgium,
$162,236; and the present capitalization of Amer-
ican railroads on a mileage basis is shown to be,
by the most recent investigations of the Inter-
state Commerce Commission, only slightly more
to-day than it was twenty or thirty years ago/

As I write, in June, 1910, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer is presenting his year's budget
in the House of Commons, and I have just
heard that House cheering the statement that
Great Britain's next year's expenses will amount
to nearly $1,000,000,000, or £198,000,000; that
between 1899 and 1909 the expenditure on the
navy increased from $120,000,000 to $200,000,-
000; on the army from $100,000,000 to $140,-
000,000; on the civil service from $185,000,000
to the enormous sum of $330,000,000, or an in-
crease of seventy-eight per cent. Great Britain's
expenditures on army, navy, civil service, pau-
pers, old-age pensioners, the insane, the feeble-
minded, are a tribute to her wealth indeed.

No other country could drive her workingmen
to emigrate, could tax her productive power by
trades-unions regulations, see her birth-rate di-
minishing, and cheer her Chancellor of the Ex-

' " Waterways — ^Their Limitations and Possibilities." An address
before the National Rivera and Harbors Congress of the United
States, 1910, by Frederic A. Delano. " Cost, Capitalization and
Estimated Value of American Railways," by Slason Thompson.

26 THE WEST IN THE EAST

chequer as he cracks jokes on the subject of these
figures. Nothing is put back into the sinking
fund, nothing is taken off the income tax, ex-
penditure has almost exactly doubled between
1890 and 1910, and the national debt stands at
$3,800,000,000, or $86 per head of the popula-
tion. I may add that the gross national debt
of the United States in the same year stood at
$2,735,815,000, or $32 per head of the popula-
tion; the national debt of Germany at $1,078,-
375,000, or $16.50 per head of the population;
the national debt of Japan at $1,162,074,850, or
$25 per head of the population; the colossal
national debt of France at $6,032,344,000, or
$153 per head of the population.

As an admirer of John Bull, I wish to call
attention to the good health and good spirits,
to the cheery, damn-the-consequences optimism,
which this situation illustrates.

Other countries are being taxed; we in the
United States are being taxed, but we are bor-
rowing on our motor-cars, our aeroplanes, our
pianos, our jewelry, our luxuries, in short. To
phrase it differently, and perhaps to some people
more cogently, we are merely pawning our easily-
done- without toys; but Great Britain, with her
income tax at war figures, and her wine and
spirits tax larger than ever, is pawning John

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 27

Bull's coat and shoes! In the United States we
have not even scratched the surface of our tax-
able possibilities, while in Great Britain it looks
as if Mrs. Bull's shawl will have to go next, and
they have dreary weather for coatless men and
shawUess women in Great Britain.

To the American who has heard overmuch of
the extravagance of America and of Americans
of late years, it is a relief to hear Great Britain's
present Chancellor of the Exchequer expounding
jauntily an expenditure of a thousand million
dollars. He and his followers evidently regard
thrift as a dreary virtue.

If an American returns from nearly a year's
journey through the Far East, where Germany,
Russia, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and Amer-
ica are all keenly interested in this condition of
the British Empire, and finds the Imperial Parlia-
ment apparently oblivious of these matters, but
engrossed in playing a game on the steps of the
throne, with a handful of Irishmen who represent
four million people only, he may be pardoned
for thinking it is business to tell his countrymen
what he can of the situation. If your neigh-
bor's house is on fire, it would be silly indeed not
to study the way the chimneys were built, dis-
cover if possible how the fire started, and who
was careless or who mischievous. He would be

28 THE WEST IN THE EAST

a sensitive householder indeed if he considered
such an investigation impertinent. If the Brit-
ish Empire is not on fire, no one will deny that
there is much smoke and smouldering both at
home and in India, in Egypt, in Persia, in South
Africa, and elsewhere.

Oh, we have heard this cry of " Wolf " so often !
reply a certain class of Englishmen. Yes, they
heard it in Spain, in Holland, they heard it in
France shortly before 1870, and heeded it not.
That fable of the cry of "Wolf" has done much
harm, because it is misinterpreted. He who
cries "Wolf" continually may be silly, but what
of him who does not listen when the real wolf
appears ? Better listen every time the cry is
heard than lose all one's sheep.

Colonels Stoppel and Lewal cried "Wolf"
about the French army before 1870, and were
met with the reply from the Minister of War Le
Boeuf: "Nous sommes archipret — jusqu' au
dernier bouton!" and shortly after, Germany
crowned her emperor in Versailles.

There are several hungry wolves about now,
and one can almost see the ironical grin when
they hear those martial heroes, Stead, and Car-
negie, and William Jennings Bryan, telling the
sheep: "Oh, it is only the old cry of Wolf!"
One is tempted at times to agree with Herbert

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 29

Spencer that "the ultimate result of shielding
men from the effects of their folly is to fill the
world with fools," but he lacks virility and pa-
triotism who succumbs to that Capuan tempta-
tion. Sir Frederick Maurice writes that of the
one hundred and seventeen wars fought by Eu-
ropean nations, or the United States, against civ-
ilized powers from 1700 to 1870, there are only
ten where hostilities were preceded by a declara-
tion of war.

Three hundred millions of Great Britain's pop-
ulation are in India; let us go there and have a
look at her biggest problem, and at the neighbors
of India in China, Japan, Manchuria, Siberia,
and Russia.

"The true fulcrum of Asiatic dominion seems
to me increasingly to lie in the Empire of Hin-
dustan. The secret of the mastery of the world
is, if they only knew it, in the possession of the
British people." So writes Lord Curzon. When
one has travelled the length of the Mediterranean
Sea, and then across it from Marseilles to Port
Said, through the Suez Canal and across the
Arabian Sea to Bombay from Aden, one needs
no convincing and would listen to no arguments
to the contrary that Great Britain, with India,
is the greatest empire the world has seen, but that
Great Britain without India, and the military

30 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and trade route to India, would soon be a negli-
gible quantity, a Spain, or Portugal, or Holland.

To read through a geography is dull business,
but to travel through your geography is enlight-
ening indeed.

The first thing that excites one's curiosity is,
that there seems to be little free trade in this
journey to Bombay. The Peninsular and Ori-
ental Steamship Company practically monopo-
lizes the passenger traffic. I was informed that
there was some arrangement with other com-
panies which left the P. and O. Company a mo-
nopoly. As a consequence of this, British gas-
tronomies have full play.

I have eaten stewed dog with the Sioux Ind-
ians in our Northwest; I have eaten indescrib-
able stuff in Mexico; I have lived for weeks
in the middle of summer on a war-ship off the
coasts of Cuba and Porto Rico on canned food;
I have, I believe, eaten rats in Manchuria; I
have, alas! overeaten in Paris; I have labored
with the stodgy, heavy food of English country
inns, and no harm has resulted; but when I
landed from that P. and O. steamer at Bombay
my stomach was in tears. My fellow country-
men will find it hard to believe, but it is a fact,
that on that same steamer on her way to some
of the hottest weather in the world, in the Suez

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 31

Canal and the Red Sea, there was only one kind
of mineral water to be had, and that only in
pints ! Can pig-headed stupidity go further ?
The linen on my breakfast tray in the morning
was, for the first two mornings, so besmeared
and spotted with egg and coffee stains that I
threatened to go to the captain. Remember,
too, that the fares on these steamers are high,
and that we were travelling as comfortably as
the accommodations of the ship permitted. No
wonder they are losing their trade. But what
business is it of mine.? Why not go by some
other line ? I will be frank, also, in my admira-
tion, and say that when I travel with my women
folk on the water, I am happier to think that
Americans or Englishmen are in command.
Both they and I will have a fair chance, and the
American or the English captain will not be
found among the saved if their passengers are
not saved too. I am bound in honor to add
that the agent of this same P. and O. line in Cal-
cutta rendered me every service in his power,
for which I shall never cease to be grateful, when
I sought his good offices to help me in getting an
invalid home. What do food and drink matter,
after all, if one may count upon efficiency and
kindness in the hour of distress and danger .'' But
even then, if it is not my business, and perhaps

32 THE WEST IN THE EAST

it is not, to criticise, this is no answer to the
hordes of houseless, hungry men that one sees
any night on the Embankment in London, nor
to the rapidly increasing hundreds of thousands
supported by the state there, nor to the hundreds
of thousands who are emigrating because there
is no work for them. They have a right to ques-
tion the muddling, unenterprising methods of
those in control, whose sole gauge of food, drink,
and dirt is a thirteen per cent dividend.

Even as we leave the quay at Marseilles the
three races — the English, the Indian, and the
French — are exploiting themselves. The Ind-
ians, three of them doing one man's work, and
physically awkward, are loading and unloading
under the governing finger of a silent English
officer. Half a dozen French girls between the
ages of seven and twelve are dancing the can-can,
as though they were in the Jardin de Paris, and
soliciting the pennies of the passengers.

A distinguished French physician has ex-
plained the attitude of France toward con-
scription and race suicide by saying that France
is hundreds of years in advance of the rest of the
world in civilization, and that the imruliness and
selfishness and, as I should term it, their ma-
tured frivolity, are marks of a higher civilization.
Some of us call it decadence. In India we are

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 33

to see a civilization, old when the French were
in skins. There too ambition is dead, and three
hundred millions are powerless in the hands of
a few Englishmen. Perhaps civilization always
ends by giving up the problem of life as insolu-
ble, and settles down to the studied frivolity of
Paris, or to the calm despair of India.

Our fellow passengers are almost all English,
with here and there a returning Parsi merchant,
or a French, German, or American globe-trotter.
There are also a number of women, some young,
some of an uncertain, twilight age, who are go-
ing out to be married. It was one of the features
of travel all through the East, I found. On al-
most every ship, under the wing of the captain,
one met one or more of these women going out
to marry men whose duties did not permit them
to go in search of their brides. So far as I could
see, the protection of the captain was altogether
unnecessary. If one may judge of the loneliness
of the bachelors in the East by the brides who
go out to marry them, it must be distressing.
There are more than a million more women than
men in England alone; the women outnumber
the men in Scotland also; only in Ireland is
there anything like an equality of numbers.
Such wealth of choice would lead, one would
suppose, to a certain aesthetic discrimination, but

34 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST

apparently in these matters the East has the ef-
fect of hurrying the white man, though in turn
the East is not hurried by him.

"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle

the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he

weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the

name of the late deceased.
And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to

hustle the East.'"

So writes Mr. Rudyard KipHng, who easily sur-
passes any man of our breed, in his power of im-
aginative analysis.

Tell me no more of the American twang! It
is distressing, if you please, but having travelled
many days in the atmosphere of the English
voice, I much prefer the rank infidelity of the
American whining twang to the guttural, not to
say catarrhal, sing-song of Anglican vocal con-
formity. Some of the more piercing English
voices may be likened unto diminutive steam-
whistles suffering from bronchitis.

He is a fussy traveller indeed who pays much
attention to such matters as these when he is
sailing through the Mediterranean to the land
of the Great Mughal for the first time. These
are mere comments to put away in the card-

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 35

catalogue of one's brain for possible future
reference.

What an embroidered sea it is! Fringed by
Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Persia, Palestine,
Egypt, Arabia. We see the land of the Phar-
aohs, of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Alexander,
Csesar, Hannibal, Napoleon. We sail through
the religions, the law, the literature, the art, the
traditions that ruled, and rule, the world.
Here are the Pentateuch, the Psalms, Job, the
Gospels, the Greek drama and comedy, the
Koran, the Epic of Antar, the literature and law
of the Latins and the Italians, and the greatest
of comedies, Don Quixote. If the Avon emp-
tied into this sea, it could claim all the greatest
names in literature. And what a literary gamut
it is from Don Quixote to the thirteenth chapter
of I Corinthians!

We saU past Rome, Athens, Carthage, Alex-
andria, Jerusalem, Mecca, and through that nar-
row blue ribbon of the Suez Canal, which binds
together the greatest empire of them all, the Brit-
ish Empire. It is the sea of all the most poig-
nant associations of the world. No one's mem-
ories are complete without it. Not to know the
Mediterranean and its associations is not to be
educated, is not to be a man of the real world,
is not to know the history of the world, for the

36 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tides of this sea are the pulse-beats of the heart
of history. We Americans are merely ethnologi-
cal mushrooms in a grove of palms and cedars.

At Port Said we are in the anteroom of the
East. I do not intend to write a guide-book.
Messrs. Murray and Baedeker have too many
literary parasites already, but I must let the ink
bubble occasionally with my personal delight,
and perhaps to old travellers my naif enjoyment
of every day of those many months spent in the
East. I gazed at those Arabs at Port Said, I
studied their sensual, and in many cases dia-
bolical, faces with awe and interest. In Europe
other white men are different, to be sure, but it
is possible to account for the differences, to ana-
lyze the differences in a superficially satisfactory
way. But these human beings are not merely
different, they are something else.

That tall, naked, black man, with his head
shaven, sitting in this broiling sun, which would
knock me over in half an hour were my head not
covered with cork and linen, and protected be-
sides by a white umbrella; this man, with his
prognathic Jaw, his shining teeth, his legs and
shoulders looking as though they had been re-
cently polished, his eyes with that clearness and
sheen in them, as though they were swimming in
some liquid, like a compass, he may be common-

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 37

place to these other travellers, but I lean over the
side and gloat over him.

This is the blood that slashed through Europe
and the East, crying that theirs was the one true
God, and that Muhammad was his one true
prophet; this is the fellow I looked at in my
illustrated geography many, many years ago in-
stead of committing the text that framed him to
memory. I can see those vignettes now. I can
see the Malay with his pagoda hat, the Indian
prince with his bejewelled turban, the Japanese
with his straw coat, the Burmese lady with her
huge cigar, the Chinese with his shaven forehead,
and his pigtail. Those baby lessons in eth-
nology, how I should have devoured the text had
I dreamed that one day I was actually to eat,
and talk, and shoot, and ride, and visit with these
people, and even take photographs of them with a
machine that was not even invented in those days.

I make no apology for gazing at that boat-load
of Arabs, huddled together waiting to coal, or
floating away having done their day's work. It
is my first real sip of the East, and I am far more
excited even than when I played my first game of
base-ball in a real uniform, made in the sewing-
room; or when I marched up to take a painfully
attenuated degree at Harvard; or when I made
my first speech in public. These are all exciting

38 THE WEST IN THE EAST

episodes, but now I am voyaging into the world
from whence we all came. I am actually getting
near the country where they invented Adam, and
Eve, and Noah. In a few hours I shall see the
place where Moses made a reputation as an am-
phibious commissariat which in my boyhood im-
pressed me far more than his unequalled ability
as a law-giver. Moses, and Jesus, and Muham-
mad were all born in this region, in this climate,
in this atmosphere, yes, I am bound to confess
that it was exciting.

The best books on the East, as every one
knows, are the Bible and the Arabian Nights,
and yet I found most travellers were saturating
themselves with snippity descriptions of monu-
ments and places, with tabloids of history, with
technical paragraphs on architecture and the
ethnic religions, with figures about the height of
this and the length of that, or condensed statis-
tics of exports and imports, and the tonnage
through the Suez Canal, and dates about the
Pharaohs, and the Mughals. No wonder they
see nothing, know nothing, enjoy nothing, and
come home bringing a few expletives, adjectives,
and photographs, which can be had for a small
price either in New York or in London.

The first thing to do in going to the East is
to turn your education out on your desk so that

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 39

you can get at the bottom of it, and there you
will find the Bible, and the Arabian Nights, and
the Odyssey, and the Iliad, and Virgil, and Herod-
otus, and Xenophon, and you will realize what
a fool you were not to have devoted more time to
them when you were asked to do so. Guide-
books can get you to the East, but they do not
get you inside. It is temperament, that counts,
not trains.

It must be about as amusing to visit the East
with a dimly informed courier, as to be taken
through the Louvre by a page-boy from the hotel ;
or to visit the British Museum, with the driver of
the cab whom you happen to hail to take you
there. Having been in the East, I can only say
to other travellers that I would not waste even
a week's time in all the East, with only the re-
sources of the average tourist at my command.
It was the unstinted, and instructed, and expe-
rienced hospitality of the English in India and
China, and of the Japanese in Japan, Korea, and
Manchuria, that made my visit profitable and
immensely enjoyable. Through them, and the
native princes of India, I was given a universal
passport, and welcomed as a chartered and priv-
ileged guest, and the burden of my debt to them
for that glorious year is beyond lightening by
any poor words of mine.

40 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Even these first Orientals out here on the
fringe seem to say to me: Beware of the men
who are ever itching to be doing something, who
cannot wait. They must be cowards at bottom,
afraid of themselves or of the world ! And after
these many months I realize that this is, to the
Westerner, the disturbing message of the whole
East, and I wonder if they are right. Perhaps
there are two forms of fatalism, the fatalism of
despair, and the fatalism of confidence, and there
you have the East and the West, never to be rec-
onciled.

The first thing one notices on going ashore for
a few hours at Port Said, is an illustration of the
methods of that British race, whose most notable
and admirable characteristic is their ability in
the governing of alien peoples. An English po-
liceman, in the uniform of the Khedive, protects
me from the yelping boatmen, with the same im-
perturbable good humor with which I am so
familiar in Piccadilly or the Strand. His coun-
tenance changes slightly under different circum-
stances. When he marches alongside the ten
thousand suffragettes on their way to the Albert
Hail he wears the amused expression, as of
one who feels that he impersonates there and
then an unanswerable reply to all their shrillness,
both physical and vocal. When he convoys

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 41

thousands from the East End to Hyde Park he
is more serious, but there again he looks, in his
steady, patient manhood, an answer, even to
them. On the boat-landing at Port Said he
seems more bored, as of a man tired of brushing
aside flies, but his behavior is ever the same.

The journey through the Suez Canal, a dis-
tance of about one hundred miles, is a slow
one, as we may not wash away these banks,
which cost eighty million dollars to build, with
the swash of a too-rapid progress. Watchmen,
crouching about their small fires at night, dot
the shores on both sides. For the first time I see
camels actually at work, own brothers to those
Bamum & Bailey loafers of my boyhood. In
the glare of the searchlight, the sandy desert on
both sides of the canal is so bright that every
now and again one catches a glimpse of a fox,
jackal, or hyena, and all through the night one
hears their cries. The sunsets, the light, and
the stillness are all different, all new to me.
The sunsets are sunsets of shade, rather than
colors, and De Tocqueville is right when he says :
"Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les
couleurs." There is a kaleidoscope brilliancy
about these cloudless sunsets, a stabbing at your ■
eyes with vivid shafts and shades, with plenty
of orange and purple and brown in them, that

42 THE WEST IN THE EAST

make me wish I were an artist, and which con-
vert me at once to the truthfulness which I had
disbeheved of many Eastern sketches. The
light seems to be something you are looking
through ; and the stillness makes you lonely even
with some one sitting beside you. The darkness
comes down all through the East with incredi-
ble quickness. You can read your book, and
then of a sudden you need a lantern to see your
way. The sun does not come up, or go down,
it shoots up and down. These people live
mentally in a perpetual twilight, but physically
they are always in a blaze of light or in pitch-
darkness. Perhaps they enjoy keeping their
minds in a state of dawn, or twilight, as a
protest.

After the Suez Canal comes the Red Sea,
and on the Arabian coast, about eight hundred
miles south, is Jiddah. I have no interest in
Jiddah, but Jiddah is the seaport of Mecca, and
somehow the word Mecca reverberates in my
brain. I have been wont to mention Seringa-
patam, Kamchatka, Timbuctoo, and Mecca and
Seoul, as far-away, fairy sort of places, that I
was no more likely to be near, much less to visit,
than, say. Mars. That comes of living in the
West. But here I am, and I cannot get quite
awake to the fact.

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 43

Jiddah, too, actually has the tomb of Eve.
That impresses my imagination very much. Not
that this first languor of the East devitalizes my
rather unorthodox upbringing, tempting me to
the historical acceptance of Eve. My theology
is unshattered, but I am bound to say I have a
friendly feeling for the imaginative proficiency of
the man who, perhaps, left his money to build
a tomb for Eve! It is at least a good schooling
in cosmopolitan charity, to be near people who
repair to the tomb of Eve as to a sanctuary;
people so calm and so unflurried by the welter of
the world, that they ignore the inextricable moral
confusion into which that lady is accused, by
many, of having plunged us.

Later on I am to be the guest of a charming
Eastern lady. Her Highness the Begum of Bho-
pal, and she is to present me with a volume of
her travels. She is a Muhammadan, and has
made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In this volume
she writes of Jiddah, and mentions the tomb of
Eve and writes: "Eve was the wife of Adam."
It is paralyzing to Western orthodoxy and to
Western conceit to realize that this lady feels
called upon to tell her readers, that Eve was the
wife of Adam. It clears the mind of a lot of
underbrush when one realizes that in the East,
among the eight or nine hundred millions of

44 THE WEST IN THE EAST

people we are to visit, one must introduce Eve
as the wife of Adam, and even then be asked, in
all probability. Who was Adam? How differ-
ent must the standards be in a covmtry, and
among peoples, where Eve is distant, dim, un-
known! It is true that even among ourselves
Eve wears but a scanty garment even of tradi-
tion, but now I am to travel in lands where she
has not even a figment of the imagination to
clothe her.

I begin to understand that all of us Occidentals
are provincial, that we have overestimated our
importance, our influence, and the effect of our
impact upon the Orientals. I shall try to re-
member, as I study these people, that Eve is
introduced, in this other world as the wife of
Adam. It is already becoming evident that
many things that I have considered as of funda-
mental importance have no significance here at
all. All the clocks, and yardsticks, and weights
and measures are different, or do not exist at all.
We are going into a world where the best of us,
no matter what our education and experience,
can only grope about. We may have conquered
the Eastern world, but, apparently, we have
changed it very little. Our much-vaunted civ-
ilization does not impress them, as we think it
should. They look upon our civilization, ap-

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 45

parently, as an attempt to make men comfort-
able, in a life which men ought not to love.

"The brooding East with awe beheld
Her impious younger world.
The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd
And on her head was hurl'd.

"The East bow'd low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again."

II

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA

IT is because they are very sophisticated, or
because they know the wonders beyond,
that certain travellers tell you that Bombay
is only the entrance to India, and not interesting.
One can make some very accurate guesses about
the people inside the house from the condition
of the front steps, the cleanliness of the bell-
handle or knocker, and the manners and appear-
ance of the servant who opens the door. At
least I am almost unconsciously in the habit of
doing so, and one is apt to be more cheerful at
the drawing-room entrance if the guardian of
the outer door gives you a pleasant greeting.
The British front door to India, or Govern-
ment House Bombay, gave us such a pleasant
greeting that we were cheerful throughout the
rest of our stay, despite hardships and illness
here and there.

First we went to the new hotel, considered the
best in India, but we were there for a very short
time, for after delivering various letters of intro-

46

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 47

duction we were promptly invited to become the
guests of His Excellency the Governor of Bom-
bay. But already at the hotel I saw many things.
Along the halls outside the guest-rooms I saw
little knots of native servants, in groups of from
two to half a dozen, according to the size of the
master's family. How little an Indian needs,
even with the good pay of a servant, was plainly
evident. They had their beds and cooking uten-
sils with them, and at certain hours one saw
them eating, or sleeping, huddled together out-
side their master's door.

Our rooms were large and airy. There was
only the necessary furniture, no hangings, and
our own bedding was used on the beds. Every-
body carries his own bedding in India, and out-
side the large establishments of the government
officials, everywhere it is needed. You are sup-
posed to carry your own bedding with you just as
you carry your own tooth-brush. In the trains,
and there are very long train journeys, by slow
trains, in India, in the guest-houses of the native
princes, in camp of course always, and in the
hotels and inns, your own bedding is a neces-
sity. Indeed you can scarcely carry too much in
India if you wish to be comfortable. All sorts
of clothing, from fur coats to the thinnest linen,
all sorts of hats from a cap to a pith-helmet, a

48 THE WEST IN THE EAST

spirit-lamp, a folding table and chair, a small
amount of tinned or bottled food and a supply of
mineral water for the train, a large supply of
linen and underclothing, for one changes often,
and the laundry work is done by beating on flat
stones. The changes of temperature from noon
till midnight are startling. One must give up
cold baths and take to tepid or hot water, and be
careful, indeed, what, and how much, one eats and
drinks. No alcohol before sunset, and very little
then, and the plainest and most nourishing food.

In this land, as large almost as the whole of
Europe, there are only a few large cities where
one can buy any of the luxuries or comforts of
life outside the obvious, and what you need you
must carry with you. On a large scale you do
what the native does, you carry your household
gods and goods about with you.

How differently "pick up your bed and walk"
sounds in your ears when you see a whole popu-
lation of hundreds of millions actually carrying
their beds with them whenever they move. Why
should one take heed as to what one shall eat, or
drink, or wear, when a handful of rice, a thimble-
ful of water, and a loin-cloth suffice. The group
of servants in front of their master's door at the
hotel, or the hundreds of families I have seen
travelling by train, by bullock-cart, or even on

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 49

foot, have squeezed and sifted life's necessities
down to the vanishing-point.

I can see why the gentle Prince of Peace ap-
pealed to the Roman, the German, the Scandi-
navian, the Briton. Those heavy-eating, hard-
drinking, hard-fighting peoples, who must have
skins, and furs, and huts, and fires, or die, saw
in Him and His teachings the very antipodes of
all they were, or strove to be. Not so the gentle
Hindu. These are not miracles to him ; indeed
along material lines, he and his ancestors, so
far as any man can recall history, have lived
in that way.

India has sixty-two million Muhammadans
to-day, and but very few Christians, and most of
these Muhammadans are converts. The Mu-
hammadan conquerors brought few women with
them, and their direct descendants are few in
number to-day compared with their converts.
To slay the idolater and the heretic, and to be
recompensed in another world of fascinating
material, not to say sensual gratifications, for
so doing, and in this world to be received at
once on conversion into the great Muhammadan
brotherhood, where there is no caste and no irre-
movable inequalities, this has appealed to the
Indian far more than the doctrines or promises
of Christianity.

50 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Muhammadanism is purely democratic. There
is no cas.te even of priests. He who mounts the
pulpit and prays, preaches, or reads from the
Koran is only an equal among equals, and not set
apart or considered above others. It is much like
the democratic ways of early Puritan Congre-
gationalism, when the sages would have snorted
indeed at the thought that their religious leader,
was in the least tainted with any such doctrine
as the indelibility of the priesthood, or powers
of confession or absolution, other than those of
any father at his own fireside. Congregational
ministers of the old type were leaders in politics,
were sent to Congress, and abroad as ambassa-
dors, and took a conspicuous part in town meet-
ings, and would have scoffed at any insinuation
that they were priests, or not as other men, in the
homely duties and responsibilities of daily life.
Alas, as society becomes more complicated, it
demands easy and simple classifications and no-
menclature, and thus a priest is a priest, a
banker a banker, a professor a professor, with-
out much time or thought given to shades and
differences.

This feature of the Muhammadan creed
appeals strongly to the caste-bound and neg-
lected Hindu, who must be born again, and
born again in no metaphorical sense, to move

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 51

an inch above the social status allotted to him
by his own religion. Besides this, the Christian
brotherliness and love in India are names, not
facts. The low-caste Hindu may become what
his abilities lead to amongst the Muhammadans,
he may become a great man among them, and
marry into the proudest family. Their wel-
come is a real one. But what Christian mission-
ary even, let alone the layman, offers his daugh-
ters or sisters to the Hindu convert .? There is
not even a Christian club in India of which he
can become a member. The proudest native
prince in India is not allowed inside the doors
of the Bombay Yacht Club, even as a guest.

One often hears Protestantism and Catholi-
cism compared, to the disadvantage of the latter,
because the Protestant countries are more pros-
perous, wealthier, more powerful. This same
reasoning is used when comparing Christianity
with Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism,
but the argument does not lie, as the lawyers say.
To the Hindu mind it is no argument at all.
His ideal is to get out of the world, not to get
what he can out of it, and stay in it. That one's
beliefs should be scientifically true, or that they
should produce in an individual or in a nation
powers of wealth-getting or comfort-making, is
not only not required of his faith by the Orien-

52 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tal, but he looks upon such tests as preposterous.
If plague or famine come to a whole province,
or loss or illness come to him individually, or the
will of a ruler, whom he believes to be divinely
guided, brings disgrace upon him, all these are
accepted as inevitable. It is part of the mys-
terious and incomprehensible divine plan, and
leads to no questioning, criticism, or even com-
plaint of the ways of God with man. We recog-
nize self-sacrifice and unselfishness as spiritual
graces to be cultivated, but the great majority
of Christians look upon an unsuccessful Chris-
tian as lacking in some essential manner the full
dower of his faith. If the Hindu believed that
his faith forbade working on Sunday, or forbade
divorce for example, he would sacrifice himself
rather than disobey. We on the contrary have
allowed laws of economics, and laws of health
and freedom to over-ride the dicta of the priest.

I am not deciding between the two, though I
believe we are right; I am merely noting differ-
ences, which must be kept in mind by the stu-
dent of the East, if he wishes to gain something
more of an understanding of the situation, than
the mere superficial contempt, and cobwebby ex-
periences, of a self-satisfied traveller.

The conversion of the thousand million brown
and yellovi^ men of Asia, by the five hundred mill-

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 53

ion Christians, is so far away in the distance that
no eye, even of the imagination, can see so far
down the aisles of time.

Far be it from me, a Christian, to discourage
the attempt. On the contrary, Christianity has
become so clogged with materialistic misinter-
pretations of its messages; the tent-making and
fishing apostles have been so lost in cardinals
and bishops living in palaces with the revenues
of princes, that the Christian missionary seems
almost the one fine and genuine thing left. Just
because there is no hope of visible success for
him, he is the more admirable and the more
Christian.

It is true that the East moves slowly, but even
if we count by centuries, the Muhammadan has
much the best of it. One Oriental race, the
Jews, who live among us, who have been perse-
cuted in every country of the world save America,
have not been converted to Christianity. The
Parsis in Bombay, there are some fifty thousand
of them out of a total population of some eight
hundred thousand, are the most prominent and
the most powerful people, financially and polit-
ically there, and come most in contact with the
British politically and commercially; but they
are as much Zoroastrians to-day as when they
fled to India from Persia. The Parsis all over

54 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST

India still retain the head-gear which was forced
upon them as a humiliation in the early days
of their coming to India, just as the Chinese
retain the pig-tail, which was forced upon them
as a mark of bondage, by their conquerors the
Tartars, two hundred and fifty years ago. The
Parsis, rich and poor alike, though like the Jews
there are few poor amongst them, maintain their
religious tenets amongst this mass of Hindus
and Muhammadans, and despite the influence
of their friends the Christian British.

The towers of silence are one of the sights of
Bombay. The Parsis will not defile the three
elements, water, fire, and earth, with the re-
mains of their dead. They refuse to dispose of
bodies after death in the water, in the ground,
or by burning.

It happened that we arrived at the towers of
silence on Malabar Hill just as a funeral pro-
cession was marching in. Shortly after we were
escorted to the top by a courteous attendant,
whose brother was the chief ofiicial. Once there
he explained in detail the procedure. In the
midst of our talk another procession wended its
way up the hill, and we saw at close quarters
what was at the moment being described.

The corpse is borne up the hill, followed by
relatives and friends in white, walking two by

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 55

two, and hand in hand, the joining of hands sym-
bolizing the perpetual prayer between the two
thus linked together. The procession halts, and
the body is then carried to a raised platform
where the covering is taken off, A swarm of
vultures from the surrounding trees flop heavily
down, and soon nothing is left but the bones.
The bones of all alike are then thrown into a
common pit, where they are converted to ashes
by chemicals.

The mourners sit about in the quiet grove pro-
vided with seats and flowers and fountains, say-
ing their prayers, while the filthy birds have their
orgies. Tales are told of a finger, or some other
portion of a body, being dropped upon the pas-
sers-by in the street below by the gorged and
greedy birds. It is a grewsome spectacle to
those unaccustomed to it, but the Parsis I saw
there seemed serene and peaceful mourners, quite
undisturbed by the quarrelling birds flapping
their wings lazily in over-fed contentment.

Here was a notable example indeed of differ-
ence of custom and its results. My friend the
Parsi could hardly refrain from the expression
of disgust at our method of delivering our dead
to the earth and the worms.

Because we of the West have succeeded be-
yond measure in material things, as compared

56 THE WEST IN THE EAST

with the East, we are apt to assume that our
methods in spiritual things are for that reason
superior. As I have said elsewhere, this is
faulty reasoning. I doubt if we have any right
to assert ourselves along these lines. These
Parsis are as confident in their faith, their creed,
their methods, horrible though this particular rite
seems to us, as are we. It is this hands-off policy
in such matters on the part of the British which
deserves the highest encomiums for their rule.

It is a pity that in matters of education they
have not adopted the same policy, a pity too
that they are playing into the hands of a minute
minority both in India and in Egypt by pushing
to the front the theory of representative govern-
ment, which the vast majority, at any rate in
India, do not understand, cannot reconcile with
their traditions, and do not want. I should be
sorry to appear bumptious in making this cate-
gorical statement. It is true that I have not
talked with all these three hundred millions of
people, nor has any one else, but I venture to
say, modestly, that I have 'talked with a greater
variety than most travellers, and with a far
greater variety than most officials, whose work
precludes the possibility of much travel, and the
consensus of those I met bears me out in this
statement.

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 57

It is not, and this is the crux of the confusion
in most Western minds, that they are not ready
for representative government, and for Chris-
tianity, but that they have no wish to get ready.
They do not want them at all. We Westerners
are exaggeratedly impressed with the superi-
ority of our institutions, both secular and eccle-
siastical. We believe that if only other peoples
understood them they would adopt them. We
spend millions, and many lives, in making them
understand, and my personal opinion is that the
more they understand, the further they are from
adopting our institutions. Our points of view,
our traditions, our moral and mental freezing
and boiling points, are worlds apart. The Ind-
ians who have seen most of England and the
English appreciate them least, and have no over-
powering wish to copy English institutions, or to
become English. The Parsis of Bombay, with
no caste prejudices, who are on the friendliest
footing with the English, who are an intelligent
and intellectually superior people, are as much
Zoroastrians to-day as though the New Testa-
ment were non-existent. The ideals of Chris-
tianity do not appeal to the great mass of the
Eastern races, or not to be too didactic, have not
appealed to them thus far successfully.

With the complaint and criticism of the trav-

58 THE WEST IN THE EAST

eller from the West that everything moves too
slowly in the East, from missionary enterprise to
the means of locomotion, I have no sympathy.
I have ridden ponies, elephants, and camels, and
driven in ox-carts and camel-carriages, and trav-
elled nearly fifty-five thousand miles during the
last year, in trains and ships, and I find them all
too rapid. Even the eight miles an hour on
General Kuroki's old military railway through
Manchuria was too fast. There is so much to
see on every hand that even an ox-cart may go
too fast. When I think that this whole volume
contains about two words for every mile I have
travelled, I realize that I am right in saying that
one goes too fast, rather than too slow, in the
East.

The Strand, Broadway, and even the boule-
vards of Paris, with the grotesque eccentricities
of the male attire, and the present-day unbifur-
cated trouser gowns of the women, are tame, and
brown, and dull, compared with the kaleido-
scope of moving color in the streets of Bombay.

At the races one day I turned my back on the
horses and counted fifty-eight different kinds of
head-gear amongst the men in the grandstand,
and no doubt there were others I did not see.
The Parsi, with his lacquered cow's hoof, the
Arab, the Persian, the Hindu, the Muhamma-

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 59

dan, from north, south, east, and west, were
there, and how many more I know not, and
when it is remembered that the Maharaja of
Gwalior's head-gear is as different from that of
his neighbor at Indore as is the cowboy's som-
brero from the tile of a Beau Brummel, and
that these differences exist all over the East, it
is easy to realize that the streets of Bombay, to a
new-comer, seem to be a waving, moving mass
of form and color.

The British in India in spite of the universal
dislike of ostentation amongst the best of them,
either here or at home, have been obliged to
assume, officially at least, an air of state and cer-
emony. The crimson and gold liveries of the
Viceroy, and of the Governors of Bombay and
Madras; the splendid body-guard of mounted
Sikhs, well horsed, proud in bearing, all of them
over six feet in height, with their turbans and
lances; the crimson-lined state carriages, with
two men in scarlet and gold on the box, and two
standing on the foot-board behind, and always
splendidly horsed, all this makes for the dignity
and splendor that the Asiatic demands of his
ruler. It may be absurd to the American, but
there is no doubt whatever that a Viceroy in a
cloth cap, on a bicycle, would ruin India in a
month. We have prejudices the Oriental thinks

60 THE WEST IN THE EAST

silly; they have prejudices that we had best in
charity and for safety's sake let alone.

The administration of India in England is in
the hands of a Secretary of State for India, as-
sisted by a council of not less than ten mem-
bers appointed for ten years by the Secretary of
State.

The executive authority in India itself is
vested in the Governor-General in Council.
The Governor-General, or, as he is more gen-
erally called, the Viceroy, is appointed by the
Crown, and holds office for five years ; this term
is sometimes extended. The salary of the Vice-
roy is 250,800 rupees a year. The rupee is now
worth one shilling and fourpence, or roughly
thirty-four cents; the salary amounts therefore
to about $84,000 a year; but I should be sorry
to undertake the job and to pay my expenses
out of that sum.

The Council of the Viceroy consists of six
ordinary members besides the Commander-in-
chief of the army, and they are appointed by the
Crown and hold office for five years. This
Council is enlarged into a legislative council by
the addition of sixteen other members appointed
by the Viceroy under certain restrictions.

Further, India is divided into nine provinces:
Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Eastern Bengal,

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 61

United Provinces, The Punjab, Central Prov-
inces, North West Frontier Provinces, and
Burma. The Governors of Bombay and Ma-
dras are the most important officials after the
Viceroy, and are appointed by the Crown, and
each carries a salary of $40,000 a year. The
Governors of Bombay and Madras have an
executive council of two members of the Ind-
ian Civil Service appointed by the Crown. The
Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, Eastern Ben-
gal, United Provinces, the Punjab, and Bur-
ma are appointed by the Viceroy with the ap-
proval of the Crown; the Chief Commissioners
of the Central Provinces and the Agent to the
Governor-General who governs the North West
Frontier Provinces are appointed by the Viceroy
in Council. Of these divisions I visited seven,
and in each I was impressed by the enormous
amount of work being done, by the conscientious,
often I thought too conscientious, way in which
it was done, and by the dignity and fearlessness
of the men who were doing it. If it were not
for the too frequent interferences from the India
Office, and the criticism from ignorant politi-
cians, who shamelessly play India off for votes
at home, it would be the most ideally managed,
as it is the most successfully administered, de-
pendency in the world.

62 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It is curious to note that an agnostic even in
office is apt to be more sentimental in his deal-
ings with men than the believer. As an avowed
heretic he may wish to prove that he is even
more merciful than the orthodox; or he may
salve his conscience by assuming an exaggerated
love for humanity as his love of God dwindles.
To worship the God of the multitude must be a
hard thing for the intelligent man, either in the
West or in the East; but to turn from that to
the flattery and adulation of the multitude itself
is to proclaim oneself to all intelligent men, no
matter what rewards and prizes are gained there-
by, as a scoffer among scoffers, as scornful in
the seats of the scorners. Conscience is so piti-
less, that even to be a prince in an ochlocracy
can hardly recompense the intellectual traitor;
and surely a trained mind, laughing in its sleeve,
will find a peculiarly painful punishment await-
ing it somewhere.

The misfortune of a dangerous illness brought
us the good fortune to spend some two weeks
as the guest of the Governor of Bombay. Here
we saw housekeeping, as I saw it again later as
the guest of the Viceroy at Calcutta, on the mag-
nificent and dignified scale made necessary by
the climate, the social demands, the high posi-
tion of the host, and his unceasing and unending

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 63

procession of guests. Very few of them are of
his own choosing or inviting, few of them indeed
his personal friends, but Bombay is the door to
India, and England has many friends all over
the world, and for reasons of state, or courtesy,
or of frank hospitality. Government House
Bombay receives them all, some to stay a night
or two, and all to lunch or to dine. Dinners of
a dozen, or of twenty, or of seventy, night after
night, and the dinner of seventy as well and as
noiselessly served as the tete-a-tete dinner in our
own sitting-room. At the head of this establish-
ment the Governor of Bombay, with a besetting
sin of toiling when he should be at play, at exer-
cise, or in bed.

The steward, or manager of an establishment
as well conducted as this must be a housewifeic
jewel of the Koh-i-noor variety. But that is
behind the scenes. I can only speak of the re-
sults.

A man who has a province of 75,000 square
miles and a population of over 15,000,000 to
govern, including a city the size of Bombay,
must have his hands full, and can spare little
time for his guests and their entertainment.

I had heard of the institution called an aide-
de-camp before, and I have met them in other
parts of the world; but just as there are peaches

64 THE WEST IN THE EAST

outside of Jersey, strawberries elsewhere than in
Maryland, clam-bakes elsewhere than in Fair
Haven, Massachusetts, soft-shell crabs, oysters,
terrapin, canvas-back ducks elsewhere than in
America, but none quite so good, so if you would
know the fine flower of aide-de-campship you
must needs go to India.

A man with as many strings to his bow as a
governor of one of these great provinces must
have many servants, capable, willing, and effi-
cient, or the business would soon be in a tangle.
These men must not only be capable, willing
and efficient, they must be loyal, and if in ad-
dition they like their chief, you have a corps of
assistants approaching perfection. There is the
Military Secretary, the Private Secretary, the
Physician, and others, each with his duties.
But besides their specific duties they are the hosts
by proxy of their chief, and everywhere and at
all times they are there to save him trouble and
to make his work easy.

Every day in your dressing-room before din-
ner you find a type-written list of the guests you
are to meet that night, and the name of the lady
assigned to you to take in to dinner. Austrian
and Polish nobles, Russian and French princes,
German diplomats, members of Parliament, offi-
cials, British and Indian, Royal Highnesses, all

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 65

must be properly placed, and all must know who
their neighbors are, and as a result what subjects
of conversation may cause friction and are to be
avoided. When all are assembled in the draw-
ing-room, the aide on duty for that day appears
with the Governor, whom he announces: His
Excellency! That gentleman makes the round
of the room, shaking hands with each, offers
his arm to the lady entitled to that honor, and
we go in to dinner where a score or more of
turbaned servants, in crimson and gold liveries
and barefooted, serve the meal.

It is noticeable that the other Europeans are
impressed by the stately and dignified way things
are done by the British officials in India. The
Governor is easily king, no matter who is there,
and during my stay he entertained all sorts, in-
cluding royalty and high diplomacy, renowned
travellers, sportsmen, journalists, and statesmen.
One gets an impression of the sturdy self-con-
trol, of the patient mental power, which are the
driving force behind the handful of Englishmen
who hold this country. They have it in their
blood, the best of these people, and these highly
placed Englishmen almost without exception —
I only met one exception, and the harm he
does, although negatively, makes one gasp to
think what would happen were there more like

66 THE WEST IN THE EAST

him — take the throne with an air of authority
and a lack of self -consciousness, as of men sitting
down for a chat with a friend.

In these democratic days much ceremony and
formality, a semblance of pomp, makes the ob-
server uneasy very often lest something, so to
speak, should come unstarched, or go wrong,
lest the procession should be marred by a sense
of unreality, and tempt one to titter. Not so
here. Even after the novelty wears off, one is
not impressed by the artificiality so much as
more and more impressed by a growing feeling
that this is not the simulacrum, but the reality
of power. But it takes a big man to carry it
off, England, by one of her blunders, still has a
knot of them here in India.

I have always thought that if I were not
myself, or as Mr. Choate gallantly and wittily
phrased it, could not be my wife's next husband,
I should like above all things to have been the
secretary to a great man, Cromwell, Hampden,
Washington, Lincoln, Bismarck, and had a hand
in the chosen doings of the picked giants of
earth.

It must be some such feeling as this which
stirs in the breast of the ideal aide-de-camp.
The aides of the Viceroy, of the Governor of
Bombay, and of the Governor of Madras who

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 67

in distinction from other officials in India re-
ceive their commissions from the Crown, wear
their aiguillettes of gold over the right shoulder,
as representatives of royalty; other A. D. C.'s
wear them over the left shoulder. A witty gen-
tleman eating honey in the country turned from
the dish and remarked meditatively: "If I lived
in the country I should certainly keep a bee!"
If I lived in officialdom I would make any sac-
rifice to keep an aide-de-camp!

An aide-de-camp is a person whose business
it is to be agreeable. His task is one requiring
unceasing vigilance, good health, good looks, a
kindly disposition, and not only manners, but
what is the finer flower of manners, manner.
His duties are so multifarious, his accomplish-
ments necessarily so varied, that it seems at
first glance a preposterous joke to propose to
any one mortal that he should perform them,
combine them, conceal them deftly, and not die
of megalomania.

He begins his day, let us say, at Government
House, by taking a guest to ride at 7 a. m. — it is
too hot to ride at any other hour. He cares no
more for that particular guest than for the grand-
sire of the horse he is riding, but he is a very
clever and a very observant guest if he discovers
it. As the clock strikes seven he appears, smil-

68 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ing, shaven, clean, with a "I hope I have not
kept you waiting!" He is full of such phrases
as that by the way. Indeed he is an anthology
of colorless and comforting phrases, not quite
flattering, not quite humble, but partaking of
both, which steep the unsuspecting in an aroma
of superiority and security. He has listened to
your banalities about horses and horseflesh, in
the smoking-room the night before, with a cer-
tain worshipful awe in his eyes, and you now
find that he rides as though he were in a cradle,
and you perhaps as though you were on a ship's
deck. He modestly defers to you as to whether
we trot, or walk, or canter, and he is ready to
go on or stop, as best pleases you. He has a
thousand things to do that day, and you nothing,
but he is positively reckless as to time if only you
are happy. If you will only waste his time,
nothing apparently will give him greater pleas-
ure. He leaves you at the door of your bungalow
on your return with thanks for your company,
and hope in his eyes and on his tongue, that
you will favor him with your company again.
You make what you consider a remarkably
quick change and arrive at the breakfast-room.
Apparently he has been there for hours. All in
white, booted and spurred, with aiguUlettes over
his shoulder, ribbons on his breast, for he is

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 69

on duty to-day, no heat, no wilted collar, no
single hair in disarray, he awaits you, and even
his smile is cool and inviting. If there are many
guests at breakfast or at luncheon he gently
insinuates you into the room, but by his manner
alone he transforms you into feeling like a whole
procession, and you swell with satisfaction as he
hands you to the best place vacant. He takes
his place, with an expression, conveyed wholly by
his corporeal attitude, as though to say: "As for
me, what matters it where I sit!" He succeeds
by some curious personal magnetism, born I
suppose of long practice, in giving you the im-
pression that you are riding upon a very tall
elephant, magnificently caparisoned, while he is
standing in the street admiring you.

After he has seen that you have your cigar or
cigarette, and asked solicitously if you have seen
the last Renter telegrams and the newspaper, he
leaves you, but he leaves you in a delicious at-
mosphere not of mere comfort, but of comfort
that you begin to feel you have deserved by some
effort of your own. There is a marked difference
between common or garden comfort and A. D. C.
comfort. The latter is lighted and scented with
a certain subtle something that makes you feel
that your state of languorous ease has been won
by you after long and arduous toil; while as a

70 THE WEST IN THE EAST

matter of scientific fact, it is only the A. D. C.
wand which has played upon your egotism, and
made it seem for the nonce noble.

If you wish to do an errand in the town before
luncheon, he will either accompany you himself,
or provide you with a companion. If he goes
himself he instals you in the right-hand corner
of the carriage or motor, in the place of honor,
and you sail away, soldiers and policemen salut-
ing, and others salaaming as you pass. He does
not say it, but his air implies that these marks
of respect are due to your imposing personal-
ity, and not to the royal liveries.

If a member of your party is ill, he never for-
gets to send her flowers, to inquire for her health,
and to suggest other comforts.

He has done an hour's work before the morn-
ing ride, and despite the air of idleness and the
apparent contempt for time, he has done two
hours' more work before the drive.

This almost feminine regard for your com-
fort, and the sight of him modestly curled up on
a sofa at tea-time, like a stretching house cat,
may lead you astray. Take him on at billiards,
at racquets, at real tennis or lawn tennis, at polo
or cricket or a day's shooting, or go through a
day's hard ride in camp or at manoeuvres with
him, and you find that he plays all the games

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 71

you know and many more, and he beats you at
all of them easily and apologetically. Among
this knot of embroidered and decorative young
gentlemen you may find a distinguished per-
former upon the piano-forte, who will play you
his own compositions; another who publishes
fugitive poems; another who could easily make
his living as a caricaturist; but none of these
accomplishments is foisted upon you, rather are
they dragged forth, or discovered by accident.
None of them will speak of himself, or his do-
ings, experiences, or successes, and one and all
abhor lime-light upon themselves or their deeds.
What an education a little of their companion-
ship would be for many of my countrymen,
who after half an hour's acquaintance seem to
fill the atmosphere with exclamation points, and
repetitions of the ninth letter of the alphabet.

On all official occasions, after dinner, or at
dances, the A. D. C.'s attentions to the forlorn,
the scraggy, the three-cornered, the convex-
backed, the concave-chested, the self-conscious,
the awkward, the acidulous of the opposite sex,
would put the most fanatical Salvation Army
captain to shame.

I have grown to look upon A. D. Cship at its
best, as one of the healing professions. It min-
isters to the social soul diseased. It deals with

72 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the more hidden maladies of vanity, self-con-
sciousness, social awkwardness, non-appreciated
virtues, hypothetical prowesses, and soothes
them unobtrusively, gently, and successfully.
Chatterton, and Byron, and Poe might all have
been saved by the ministrations of an accom-
plished A. D. C.

As for his relations with his chief, he sur-
rounds him with a purring adulation which
soothes irritation, and lays the dust of the small
attritions and futilities of the daily task. He
gives spiritual subcutaneous injections of con-
fidence and courage; waves aside the phantoms
of discouragement; lights up the dark places of
dull duties ; and helps to fulfil the deeds in hours
of insight willed, which must be done, like most
severe tasks, in hours of gloom.

If he really likes and respects his chief, his
voice and mien are a veritable paean and halle-
lujah of praise, when he appears before the
guests and announces: His Excellency! You
are at once prejudiced in the great man's favor,
prone to believe that he is indeed Excellent.

There is nothing mawkish about this loyalty,
nothing effeminate. It is like the tenderness
with which an engineer oils his great ship-pro-
pelling machinery, or the gentleness and care of
a sportsman for his guns.

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 73

In a climate where the greatest discomforts
come from the heat, and the entomological off-
spring of the heat, the houses are built for cool-
ness and for shade. At Government House
Bombay, there is a large central bungalow con-
taining the drawing-rooms, dining-room, billiard-
room, ballroom, smoking-room, the entertain-
ing-rooms in short, and surrounding it are the
bungalows containing the living apartments of
the Governor, his staff, and his guests. We
were royally housed in a bungalow overlooking
the bay, with reception-hall, sitting-rooms, bath-
rooms, and bedrooms, and with separate en-
trances and outer halls. The service is at first
uncanny, so noiseless are the barefooted attend-
ants. You wash your hands in your dressing-
room, and almost before you are out of the room
a silent brown man has slipped in to change the
water.

Servants are of course cheap as measured by
our standards, though by no means as cheap as
they were twenty-five years ago; but they are
also so bound, partly by caste rules, partly by
lethargy, partly by centuries of habit, that it re-
quires many of them to keep the household ma-
chine going, even when it is of modest propor-
tions. In the case of the Governor of a great
province or more particularly in the case of the

74 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Viceroy, the number required is legion. No
one of them will undertake another's task, and
the social and religious differences between
them are so great that there are no illustrations
from American life that will serve to mark them.
Between the low-caste sweeper of the garden
walks and the Sikh soldier on guard at the front
door, for example, there is a social difference not
of degrees but of latitudes. It is criminal to
think of associating together.

We must not forget that we are among people
here in India who though starving will throw
away the meal with contempt upon which even
the shadow of a low-caste man has fallen. We
should remember too that these peculiarities of
caste are not uncommon even among ourselves.
The writer of Genesis recalls that the custom
existed in Egypt "because the Egyptians might
not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an
abomination unto the Egyptians." When Joseph
entertained his brethren in the house of Pharaoh
the Egyptians ate apart, the Hebrews ate apart,
and Joseph ate apart, much as the Maharana
of Udaipur would do to-day did he entertain
strangers and inferiors. I know more than one
continental Catholic who has never to his knowl-
edge sat at table with a Jew; and we all of us
eat, and drink, and are friendly with people

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 75

whom we do not ask to break bread with us
at our own tables. These Indians have their
caste prejudices, so have we, and when analyzed
the differences are of degree rather than funda-
mental, and so likewise are the eccentricities of
housekeeping in the East or the West; there are
difficulties to contend with on both sides of the
world.

Bells and mechanical appliances are not nec-
essary, for at any hour of the day or night you
clap your hands, and there glides noiselessly into
your presence a brown phantom to do your bid-
ding. All the work of every kind is done by men,
except the sweeping of the leaves by one or two
women in the garden. They all seem, if one may
judge from appearances, not only contented but
proud. Good behavior means fixity of tenure,
and ultimately a pension. Tipping fairly, when
there are so many, is impossible. The visitor
finds a notice in his apartments asking him not
to fee the servants, but calling attention to a
box, into which he may put a contribution
if he wishes. This contribution is added to
the Pension Fund. The same justice, and
honesty, and impartiality which hold all India,
hold even more effectively here, because in the
case of servants they come into closer contact with
their masters, and in many cases like them as

76 THE WEST IN THE EAST

well as respect them. John Nicholson was not
only a hero among his white fellows but a hero
too, to his soldiers and servants. His great
height, his flowing beard, his dignity of bearing,
and audacious courage so delighted the Sikhs
that a sect of them called themselves by his
name, and established him as their Guru, or
priest.

Among other letters, I had a letter to a dis-
tinguished Hindu, who has won high rank in the
judiciary of India. I spent a long day in the
courts with him, and on one occasion I sat
through a scene which I shall never forget. The
buildings used by the court in Bombay are larger
and finer than those in New York, and the judges
better paid than even our judges of the Supreme
Court of the United States. The case was one
of appeal from a decision of the lower court con-
demning two Hindus to death for murder. It
was a disgusting story, and most of the evidence
was circumstantial, except that of a lad of six-
teen, a decadent, who claimed that he had been
forced by the others to take part in the crime.
There sat a Hindu judge, and beside him an
English colleague; the case was argued for the
appeal by an English barrister. Many hours,
much money, much investigation and sifting of
evidence had gone into this dull matter of the

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 77

guilt or innocence of these three Hindus of the
very lowest caste. The British machine was
working as carefully, as minutely, as though great
personages, or important matters of state were
at stake. It was an object-lesson of the slow,
ponderous English way of being just. It was a
sledge-hammer to crack an egg, but it was justice
for those cow-herds, who possibly earned two or
three cents a day, and justice as nice, and care-
ful, and impartial as for a prince. In the old
days their ruler would have had their heads off,
or their brains and bellies crushed to a jelly be-
neath an elephant's feet and knees, or sent them
about their business in five minutes, and nor the
victims, nor their friends, nor any one else would
have thought anything more about it.

In a country where lying and deceiving are
looked upon as an intellectual employment as
worthy as any other; in a country where a man
will murder his own child and bury it in his neigh-
bor's garden to fasten suspicion upon him, it is
easy to realize how difficult is justice, and how
experience alone can weigh evidence and get
the truth from witnesses. It is sciolism worse
confounded to write letters and pamphlets from
cosy chambers in London or New York on the
subject of justice in India, the tyranny of the
police, the haughty English official, and kindred

78 THE WEST IN THE EAST

criticisms. I have visited courts and prisons, I
have sat in the highest court, and also in front
of the deputy-commissioner's tent pitched on the
plains of the Punjab, on a hot day, and thus seen
justice meted out to the high and low, and to all
conditions of men and women, and now that I
am far away from it all, I marvel even more than
I did then at the patience, forbearance, kindli-
ness, and impartiality that I saw.

My distinguished Hindu friend was of the
Brahman class, who had been educated in Eng-
land and thereby, by crossing the black water,
outcasted. He belonged to the intellectuals of
his creed, and told me he was what we should call
a Unitarian. He praised the virtues of the Hin-
dus, said they were peaceable, gentle, mild, but
also suspicious, envious, and jealous, and easily
excited by playing upon their religious fears,
when they lost all sense of the justice and honesty
of their rulers, or of anybody else, and became
cruel. The Hindus, he said, have as a rule but
one wife, taking another only in case the first one
bears no children, or, among the lower classes,
that there may be more people to work the land,
and this in spite of the fact that their religion
does not forbid polygamy.

He maintained, as did every Indian of the
scores I talked with, that caste is the curse of

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 79

the country, keeping people apart, setting them
against one another, and that so long as caste
exists there is no hope of self-government.

He thought the British did not see enough of
the people, were socially exclusive, and thereby
barred from understanding the people they lived
among. I said that all Englishmen made the
same remark, that the Indians are inscrutable,
mysterious. He denied this, and said that they
were quite understandable, and would talk freely
and frankly, but that they were not allowed to be
on such terms with the English as permitted free-
dom and frankness of intercourse, and that there-
fore they were dubbed inscrutable. He said the
feeling between Hindus and Muhammadans was
as strong, and in some places as bitter, as ever.

He thought some protection would be good for
India, for of course with free-trade, India was at
the mercy of Lancashire.

He was in favor of as much participation in
the government by natives as was possible, and
held that education was making progress even
among the women. He showed the same feeling,
though very guardedly expressed, that other in-
telligent Indians show wherever one meets them,
that much of the distrust and dread of the Ind-
ian for the English are due in great part to the
unsympathetic attitude of the majority of the

80 THE WEST IN THE EAST

English, and claimed that confidence and sympa-
thy would be repaid by loyalty and frankness.

We discussed the curious contradictoriness of
the English, who insist upon the unearned in-
crement theory as applicable to land in India,
though they fight it at home; and who support
the theory of native princes in India, with their
patriarchal influence and methods of govern-
ment, while denouncing dukes and great land-
lords at home. We agreed upon one thing, that
the subtilties of British compromise were be-
yond us.

I quote this gentleman, as I shall quote others,
not because I agree or disagree with all their
views, but that my readers may grind each his
own axe. As for me, I beg to emphasize the
fact that I have no axe to grind other than to
call the attention of my countrymen to problems
and situations that they are marching toward,
and that rapidly.

At a dinner given for me by the Chief- Justice,
we dined at a new club where both Indians and
British meet. Indeed, it was formed for that pur-
pose, and certain already hard-worked English-
men whom I met make it a point to go there.
At the dinner in question only men were present,
and there were as many Indians present as Eu-
ropeans, and it seemed to me that problems

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 81

of government and politics were discussed as
freely as they would have been in New York or
in London.

But when one leaves this atmosphere of the
high-placed, to spend many hours in the part
of the town inhabited by the Indians themselves,
the practical situation seems to swamp the the-
ory completely. What sympathy, what kind-
liness, what understanding of their needs or of
their defects can permeate this mass .'' Even
my Hindu friend, when pressed for an opinion,
admitted that he saw no solution except British
domination for centuries to come. Just what
your eyes see, just what your ears hear, make
you almost contemptuous of the most intelligent
man's opinion who has not actually been in In-
dia. These streets swarming with people; these
shops, which are merely large-sized goods boxes
with one end taken off, in which are huddled
merchants and their families and their wares, in
a cubic space perhaps twice that occupied by a
deer-hound when travelling in his huge basket
to a show; the variety of costumes, head -gear,
and physiognomy, I was told that forty different
dialects are spoken in the bazaars of Bombay,
distinctions of class apparent even to my untu-
tored eyes, from the man in a loin-cloth to
some petty raja in a gilded coach, with servants

82 THE WEST IN THE EAST

swarming over it and around it, or dainty Parsi
women taking their airing in well-turned-out
carriages, with footmen clearing the way for
them; beggars covered with dust and ashes;
Arabs and students, what a mixture it is!

Nor democracy, nor any other form of govern-
ment, has done away with social differences, for
the form of government is yet to be even dreamt
of that can endow men with equal patience, equal
industry, equal good judgment, and until that
time comes, society will be as little level as the
troughs and crests of the ocean. Even in the
West, where religion and politics have assumed
the livery of Equality, little has been done; but
in the East religion and politics for thousands of
years have insisted that justice demands inequal-
ity, and from Quetta to Calcutta, and from Ma-
dras to the Khaibar Pass, there is no sign that
the old ways are passing.

A journalist whom I met in Bombay, who,
though he was not an anarchist, was nonethe-
less voluble in his criticisms of the British meth-
ods of rule, was discussing the recent visit of Mr.
Keir Hardie to India, and I remarked that he
was a curious leader for a Brahman to foUow.
"We do not follow him," he replied, "we are
only using him as we should use anybody else
who will follow us! The men he influences," he

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 83

continued, "are of little use to us, but they are a
nuisance to the British."

There are over a thousand newspapers pub-
lished in the vernacular in India in over twenty-
two dialects or languages. In the large cities
like Bombay, and to some extent in the outlying
districts, they have a certain influence, not al-
ways, I fear, for good.

But if the East is buried deep in its own su-
perstitions, we are obsessed by ours. Education
and teaching are two of ours. The misty talk
about teaching people to respect themselves is a
very loose phrase. To teach Lincoln to respect
himself was to increase his respect for patience,
for humility, for good-humor; to teach John
Nicholson to respect himself was to increase his
respect for truth, courage, and duty; on the
other hand, to teach a forger to respect himself
is to make his next forgery more daring; to teach
a thief to respect himself is to make his next
loot larger; to teach certain firebrand politicians
to respect themselves, either in India or in Eng-
land, is to increase their respect for jaunty om-
niscience, for second-hand scholarship, and for
the sly sedition of the bomb, the pistol, and the
vernacular press.

To teach a man to read, or to write, or to
count does not teach him to think, or to know.

84 THE WEST IN THE EAST

We tried teaching our Indians ; England teaches
in India — under the segis, by the way, of the
most absurd Macaulayan and antiquated system,
the system of a man as contemptuous and ig-
norant of Eastern literature, religions, and phi-
losophy as he was accomplished as a maker of
historical phrases and liter'ary antitheses — but to
little avail, for the reason that few of us as yet re-
alize the limitations of education. The Indian
senior wrangler is no more morally an Englishman
than he was before he knew the English alphabet.
You cannot teach character, no matter how much
else you teach, and character is the only thing
worth while. Men are only of the same class,
of the same moral aristocracy, when their blood
boils and freezes at the same moral temperature,
and in all the world there is no text-book on that
subject, and but few teachers.

Much of the confusion in this matter arises
from the fact that we confound training and edu-
cation. The majority of men who go through
schools and universities get no training at all,
and fail and are forgotten; the men who do get
the training in schools and universities make it
appear that it was altogether due to school and
college, which is not the case at all. It was train-
ing that produced Washington, Hamilton, Lin-
coln, Grant, Sheridan, "Stonewall" Jackson,

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 85

and Lee, and not education in any academic
sense, though Hamilton, Jackson, and Lee were
students. It is not the learning that makes the
man, but the man who uses his learning as a
gymnasium in which to train his powers. We
go on crowding men into state and philanthropy-
supported institutions of learning as though they
were magical receptacles for the production of
trained men. Years of failure have taught us
nothing.

I agree that the state ought to supply the op-
portunity for elementary study, and that it is
wise and generous charity which offers oppor-
tunity for high and costly experiment and in-
vestigation, but only those who earn their way
ought to have the path beyond made easy.
Luther, and Erasmus, and Bacon, and the lesser
breed of intellect, will blaze their own paths
through the forest of difficulties; the others
should not be pampered into intellectual daw-
dling, but left, and even forced if necessary, to
fell the forest and plough the plain.

America has had free education from the be-
ginning, an unequalled test, and yet the men
who have made America are without university
degrees, with such few exceptions that the aca-
demically educated are lost in the overwhelm-
ing majority who have trained themselves. Even

86 THE WEST IN THE EAST

those who have academic degrees owe their
places in the world to other training than the
training received from books and professors.

The world wonders at the decadence of school-
beridden France, where the boys are effemina-
tized, the youths secularized, and the men ster-
ilized, morally and patriotically; France with
its police without power, its army without pa-
triotism, and its people without influence; dis-
orderly at home and cringing abroad; a nation
owing its autonomy even, to the fact that it is ser-
viceable as a buffer-state. When I write "disor-
derly at home," it is not the off-hand rhetoric
of the hasty writer. Monsieur Emile Massard
made a report to the Paris Municipal Coun-
cil on the subject of the encumberment of the
Paris streets. He says there are nearly half a
million vehicles of all kinds in Paris to-day, with
twenty thousand hand-carts and nine thousand
barrows. In 1909, sixty-five thousand eight hun-
dred and seventy accidents were caused in the
Paris streets by eighty-one thousand eight hun-
dred and sixty-eight vehicles, or about three ac-
cidents for every four vehicles, and there was one
summons for every seventy-seven motor taxi-
cabs. I am unorthodox, I might even be dubbed
a heretic by the narrow, but I am bound to con-
fess if ever a nation suffered from physical and

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 87

moral dry-rot, as a direct result of secular ed-
ucation, it is France.

America and Germany have been saved from
this by faith and reverence. In France reverence
has been knocked on the head and faith smoth-
ered in ridicule, and she has produced a school-
bred hooligan, in Paris at any rate, whose lack
of the human traits of decency, honesty, gentle-
ness, and manliness are unequalled outside of
a menagerie. Heretic I may be, but I would
rather suffer a Mass even, than mock at my
mother country.

Education without moral training is simply
a diabolical misfortune. But the fallacy re-
mains, and with it a terrible waste of human
material, and an increase of that uneasy unhap-
piness which is the curse of modern society; for
men and women are naturally discontented who
feel dimly that they are developed along wrong
lines, and yet are loath to admit that they should
exchange the black coat for the blouse, the pen
for the plough, and the anaemia of mediocre men-
tal accomplishment for the health of rude toil.

There is a multitude of failures at these Ind-
ian examinations. It takes twenty-four thousand
candidates for matriculation to secure eleven
thousand passes, and of these eleven thousand
only one thousand nine hundred survive to take

88 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the B. A. degree. At Oxford, for example, and
as a means of comparison, the number of those
who fail to matriculate is negligible, and of the
nine hundred who annually matriculate, about
six hundred and fifty proceed to their degree.
In the long run, God himself readjusts matters.
Development along false lines ends in disgrace
and failure. We to-day may see Turks and
Italians, the descendants of the Mughals and
the Caesars, working as day-laborers in the far-off
West of the Argentine Republic, and five hundred
years hence a Chinese official will ponder over
the fact that the descendants of English lords
and American millionaires are tilling his fields.
By instinct we say "Mother Earth" and "Mother
Nature," and we are right; all the others are
step-mothers, or mothers-in-law.

It is curious that England, which has won so
great an empire, and which has been ruled and
served by an uneducated but trained aristocracy,
should of all nations turn to books and profes-
sors to solve its Indian problems. In the House
of Commons, July, 1910, there were one hundred
and eleven Etonians, the great majority of whom
are far better fitted to lead a squadron of cavalry,
or to govern a foreign province, than to pass an
examination in competition with Frenchmen or
Germans of their own age. I hope I am not as-

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 89

suming too much when I say that these same
Etonians would agree with me.

India needs engineers, agricultural chemists,
archaeologists, mining engineers, architects, stat-
isticians, students of hygiene, political econ-
omists, scientific farmers, but how many such
men have her schools and colleges produced ?
Practically none. All this work is done by Eu-
ropeans, while the Indian student has but one
aim : to become an employee of the government,
a cog in the wheel of bureaucracy, with a little
power over his fellows, and a pension in store for
him. The supply of these students is exceeding
the demand, and those left over are like badly
cooked food, neither good as a fertilizer nor to
eat ; they are spoiled for the fields and too feeble
for useful mental labor. I mean no insult. I
am saying of the East what I have first said
of the West. England has transferred the West-
ern fetich of secular education to India, with the
result that might have been expected. The
Indian seditionist is no worse than the Parisian
hooligan, and both, with certain differences,
are the result of the same system.

The sun is blazing down on the garden in
which lives a saint, so-called, whom I visited one
day in Bombay. He has not spoken for twenty-
three years, and his neighbors look upon him

90 THE WEST IN THE EAST

with awe. He permits me to take his photo-
graph, and I wonder whether it is for peace or as
a penance that he has made this law for himself.
We question him, and he by signs tells us that he
is quite happy, quite indifferent whether he lives
or dies, and quite sure that all is for the best in
the world, if one only takes a perspective of, say,
a thousand years or so. We are too close to
things to know much about them, he maintains,
and gets as far away as he can.

Some months later, I visit at Davos Platz a
man who for nearly thirty years has been study-
ing drops of blood under a microscope. He is
getting as close to life as he can, but admits that
he knows little more than the sage in his hot gar-
den at Bombay. Both the W^estern scientist and
the Eastern sage smile indulgently at the fussi-
ness of modern life. My own experience of men
in many lands has taught me that the most ac-
tive are the least valuable. It is a notable sur-
vival of the simian in man, that so many people
think that constant mental and physical activity
is a measure of value. Busy people seldom ac-
complish anything. The statue, the poem, the
painting, the solution of the economic, financial,
or social problem, the courage and steadfastness
for war even, are all born in seclusion and appear
mysteriously from nowhere. Cromwell, Wash-

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 91

ington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Dante, and Cer-
vantes all appear from nowhere, and promptly
take command of the busybodies. What a crowd
of men we all recall who were so busy making
themselves remembered that they are already
forgotten! It is said that some ninety-five per
cent of business men, brokers, and bankers fail.
It is busyness that does it. We must give the
Eastern philosophy its due. We are none of us
infallible, not even the most modern of us, and I
am not sure that the proud flesh of the social
sore is not as visible in the Tweed Ring, in the
State-House scandals in Pennsylvania, in the
Sugar scales of certain millionaire merchants, in
the Poplar Union revelations in England, or in
the crowd at a race-meeting in Paris, as any-
where in India or in China.

I regret, for the sake of my Western readers
who are accustomed to the proclamatory cock-
sureness of irritable activity, that I am leaving
Bombay with so little ability to provide them
with any essence of omniscience of my own man-
ufacture. Having no claims social, political, or
financial to make upon my fellow-countrymen, I
am satisfied to serve them with food for thought,
rather than to denounce them for the benefit of
their enemies, or to flatter them for their own
undoing, that I may have their approval.

Ill

THE GREAT MUGHAL

IT is much like trying to sop up the Gan-
ges with a bath sponge, to attempt to give
briefly, and yet satisfactorily, an outline of
the history of India. If I were telling some one
else how to thread the beads of such an historical
sketch, I should suggest a series of names, names
of men who have stood as corners around which
the current of events has swirled. Buddha 500
B. C; Asoka 257 B. C; Alexander 327 B. C;
Kanishka 40 A. D.; Timur 1398 A. D.; Babar
1482-1530; Akbar 1556-1605; Shah Jahan
1628-1658; Sivaji 1627-80; Clive 1751-1767;
Hastings 1773-1784; Ranjit Singh 1780-1839;
Dalhousie 1848-1856; John Nicholson 1857.

There are many omissions here, but from the
time when India rises above the horizon of legit-
imate history down to that Sir Galahad of the
Mutiny, John Nicholson, who was shot through
the heart at Delhi, with the words: "Forward,
Fusiliers! Officers to the front!" on his lips,
one can grasp the main features by a study of

92

THE GREAT MUGHAL 93

these biographies. Those last words of Nichol-
son, too, leave one with a tingle in the blood,
and a fine flavor of the nobility of English man-
hood, which was never more wanted in India, and
in England, than to-day. Some such thing
must be done, however, to make any sketch of
British rule, or of present conditions in India, in
the least comprehensible. This is the more nec-
essary when one hears, not only from those who
have never visited India, but from those who
have been there, suggestions and discussions
which might lead one to believe that India had
always been, and is to-day, a national entity like
France, or Germany, or Italy. India is not in
the least like Poland, battling for national ex-
istence against Russia and Germany; not in
the least like Italy delivering herself from
Austria.

India has never had any national existence
whatsoever. India is even now, and always has
been, as much divided into nations, states, races,
religions, languages, as is Europe, or Asia, or
Africa. The Sentimentalist, who, Meredith tells
us, is "a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil.
Wealthy communities must engender them,"
speaks, and writes of India, as though it had been
enslaved by the British, robbed of its personality,
starved in its natural national growth, shorn of

94 THE WEST IN THE EAST

its liberties, and deprived of any representation
in its own government.

It comes as a surprise therefore, particularly
to the American, who must always listen sym-
pathetically to tales of tyranny, particularly if
the Briton be the tyrant, to find that India has
never had a national personality, nor any natural
national growth, nor anything approaching na-
tional liberty, nor anything even dimly shadow-
ing forth representative institutions, nor has she
ever dreamt of individual liberty as we know it.
Moreover, out of the three hundred millions of
the population, two hundred and ninety millions
at least do not know what these things mean, and
do not care. The average Indian does not know
that America has been discovered, he has no
idea of the British constitution, or of the cabi-
net, he does not know that there is a British
Secretary of State for India. Such loyalty and
knowledge as he may have, centre in three
Lords: the "Bara Lat" or Viceroy, " Chota Lat"
Provincial Governor, directly over him, and the
"Jangi Lat" or Commander-in-Chief in In-
dia. Most of them, however, only know the word
Sarkar or the government. He lacks even an
equivalent for the word "vote" in his language.
He recognizes power, position, but has not the
vaguest notion of "majorities." A change of

THE GREAT MUGHAL 95

government to him means merely a change of
ruler, another man in place of the old one. He
knows nothing of changes of principle, of eco-
nomic differences, of party cries. Government
to him has always meant, and means to-day, au-
tocratic power expressed in the person of a man.
Only a tiny minority in India know anything of
the whys and wherefores of the party govern-
ment in England, by which they are ruled.

Unless this profound ignorance of modern po-
litical methods in India is clearly understood,
and kept ever in the back of the brain in all dis-
cussions of India and its peoples, misapprehen-
sions and misunderstandings are sure to follow.

The discussions, experiments, and agitations
at the present time in regard to India, are lead-
ing many people, both in England, where it
is their duty to know better, and all over the
Western world, to suppose that India as a whole
is perhaps almost ready for representative gov-
ernment. Those who know the actual condi-
tions in India are trying to disabuse the minds
of people of this error, but strange to say it is
diflScult.

Lord Cromer said not long ago: "If they
considered the immense diversity of race, re-
ligion, and language in India, and also that
they would be endeavoring to transplant to

96 THE WEST IN THE EAST

India a plant entirely of exotic growth and plac-
ing it in very uncongenial soil, he must confess
for his own part that he should be very much
surprised if the legislative experiment did suc-
ceed." Other experienced governors of alien
races have said the same.

Lord Curzon, whose opinion upon all matters
relating either to the Near or to the Far East,
must be received with respect, says: " The bulk
of the peoples of India want, not representative
government, but good government, and look
to the British officers for protection from the
rapacious money-lender and landlord, from the
local vakeel (attorney), and all the other sharks
in human disguise which prey upon these un-
happy people."

My own opinion as an observer from the out-
side is, that the peoples of India are no more
fit for representative government than are the
inmates of a menagerie, and that were the Brit-
ish to leave India for three months, India would
resemble a circus tent in the dark, with the me-
nagerie let loose inside. There would be no safety
except for the cruel, and those who could hide;
and there would be no security because there
would be no shame. Tooth and nail and fang
would have full play again, and that callous
cruelty, which, more than any other quality.

THE GREAT MUGHAL 97

stamps the Oriental as different from the Oc-
cidental, would slaughter the strong, enslave the
weak, and market the women for the harem or
the plough.

The very men who study chemistry in Lon-
don, under the protection of British law, in or-
der to learn how to make bombs, to hurl at an
English Viceroy and his wife, and who are the
most vociferous pleaders for representative gov-
ernment, would be the first to hide, and the first
to suffer; aside from that I can see no advantage
in opening the doors of the cages for many years
to come.

One of their stanchest friends, and one of
their most brilliant British rulers, and a scholar
in all matters pertaining to the politics of the
East, writes out of his almost unequalled expe-
rience as traveller and ruler: "in character a gen-
eral indifference to truth and respect for suc-
cessful guile, in deportment, dignity, in society
the rigid maintenance of the family union, in
government the mute acquiescence of the gov-
erned, in administration and justice the open
corruption of administrators and judges, and in
every-day life a statuesque and inexhaustible
patience, which attaches no value to time, and
wages unappeasable warfare against hurry."

It is idle for the Westerner to attempt to form

98 THE WEST IN THE EAST

political or social opinions about these people
till he has dwelt among them, watched them,
studied them. Their clumsy inefficiency physi-
cally, their depressed mental attitude, their shiv-
ering timidity, their suUen solemnity, I am writ-
ing, of course, of the mass of the people, are
beyond anything the Western imagination can
picture. It is not only idle to attempt to form
opinions, let me go further, and say that I hold
it cruel to the people themselves, to attempt to
irritate them into the belief that they can, for
scores of years to come, undertake to take care
of themselves politically, socially, or morally.
Every man of humane instincts ought to be
grateful that they have at last a guardian who is
honest, just, self -controlled, and lacking some-
what in sentiment and imagination.

Two hundred and fifty millions of this popu-
lation are entirely dependent upon agriculture
for a living, and Lord Curzon himself has esti-
mated the total annual income of the Indian
peasantry at a trifle over five dollars a head!

India has an area of more than one and a half
million of square miles, and a population of,
roughly, three hundred millions. Her area in
square miles is equal to the total area of Europe
less Russia, and her population is greater than
that of all Europe, less Russia. The great di-

THE GREAT MUGHAL 99

versity of climate in India, the extremes of heat
and cold, of drought and wet, of fierce winds and
calms, and the consequent plagues, famines and
crop failures, are the result of a peculiar geo-
graphical position. If one could stand India up
on end, the Himalaya mountains, with one peak,
Mt. Everest, twenty-nine thousand feet high,
would hang over the pear-shaped peninsula like
a great, broad-brimmed hat. If you look at a
raised map of India, you will see the resemblance,
for the Himalaya mountains, which separate In-
dia on the north-east from the great, barren
plateau of Tibet, seem to hang over India like a
huge, curling parapet. It looks as though the
bare backbone of the world had protruded here.
One hundred and fifty miles from the gulf of
Bengal, where the Assam range of hills runs out
into the plain, the rain-clouds bursting against
these, give a rainfall of four hundred and fifty
inches ! While to the west, in the plains of Raj-
putana, there is scarcely water enough for a
blade of grass.

When camping out with the troops on ma-
noeuvres, north of Lucknow, riding in the middle
of the day was oppressively hot, but at eleven
o'clock at night all the blankets and fur coats
one could pile on, were not too much for com-
fort.

100 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The English have done much to bring about a
certain regularity of water supply. Taking the
country as a whole, one acre in seven is irrigated.
Thirteen million acres are watered by wells, fif-
teen million acres are watered from tanks, or
small private canals, and seventeen million acres
are watered by canals, built and maintained by
the government. I am not an authority on such
matters, but I am told that these irrigation works
in India are not only triumphs of engineering
skill, but the most beneficent works of the kind
in the world. It is easy to believe this, when
one realizes that the failure of the year's rain in
India means that two-thirds of the population
are out of employment for a year, with of course
a consequent rise in the prices of necessary
commodities.

There are now in India over thirty thousand
miles of railway, more miles of railway than has
France, three times more than Italy, as much
as Austro-Hungary, and only six thousand miles
less than Germany. In 1857 there were only
three hundred miles of railway. What must
have been the helplessness of India in famine
years, when there were no means of transporta-
tion! If England had done nothing more, one
must go slow in criticising her, when these canals
and railways are remembered.

THE GREAT MUGHAL 101

She alone has fought grim Nature in India
with the resources of science, with the result of a
saving of millions of lives. No other conqueror
spent his time, energy, money, and the lives of
his own people, in such enterprises. Nadir Shah
rode off with millions. Other conquerors did
the same. England has poured millions into
India, and the malcontents are grumbling be-
cause she exacts in interest far fewer sovereigns
than she has saved lives. Human beings at five
dollars a head seem cheap enough!

When we recall that crowded France has only
a population of under two hundred to the square
mile, and that even in overcrowded England
wherever the density of the population is over
two hundred to the square mile, the population
ceases to be rural and must live by manufactures,
mining, or city industries; what is the picture
presented by India, where many millions of
peasants are struggling to live off half an acre
apiece. So wholly is this population agricult-
ural, their one interest the tilling of the soil, that
less than one fifteenth of them live in towns with
more than twenty thousand inhabitants.

India is a continent, and not in any sense
a nation. Travel from Bombay, let us say, to
Peshawar, and from there drive into the Khai-
bar Pass, and as you travel you see people as

102 THE WEST IN THE EAST

different from one another as though you trav-
elled from Seville to Moscow, or from the City
of Mexico to Vancouver, and yet this is all
India.

The error lies in confusing the idea of India,
in talking of, or discussing India, as though In-
dia were like Spain or Germany, like Mexico or
Canada. She not only has layer after layer of
races, but also layer after layer of religions, of
forms of government, of customs and of ideals,
and prejudices. You are not dealing with one
nation, nor with one religion, nor with one ethical
code, nor with one language, nor with one gen-
eral trend of social custom, but with scores and
scores of them. There are half a dozen different
languages, and over five hundred different dia-
lects.

Not to know something of all this, and some-
thing of India's previous history, is to read of
India, and to travel in India, with the mind
blindfolded.

Social as well as all other phenomena have two
aspects, the dynamic and the static; the former
dealing with the forces which brought the phe-
nomena into existence, the latter dealing with
them as they exist. A sketch of the history of
India will help with the former, and travel in
India itself ought to tell us something of the lat-

THE GREAT MUGHAL 103

ter. But either alone avails little to understand
the problem.

India has been the great jousting-ground of
the world. Whoever would break a lance during
the last twenty-five hundred years or more, was
tempted by the tales of fabulous wealth, of con-
cealed treasure, of rivers whose sands ran gold,
to arm himself and set out for India. Greeks,
Persians, Turks, Tartars, Mongols, Scythians,
Afghans, Arabs, the Dutch, the French, the Por-
tuguese and the English, and odd tribes besides,
have sallied into India at one time or another, to
conquer, to pillage, or to slaughter. Some of
these left traces of their blood, some of them
their buildings, and others their colonies. Till
the British came, they brought, and they took
away everything, except peace.

The British, whatever may be said of their
motives for coming, or of their methods of tak-
ing and keeping territory, were the first conquer-
ors who brought peace and administered equal
justice to all. Both justice and peace are so
new to India, that their very novelty is the foster-
mother of many of the problems which confront
England in India to-day. Alexander the Great,
Asoka, Tamerlane or Timur the Lame, Mah-
mud of Ghanzi, Babar, Akbar the Great, Nadir
Shah, and many more, are of those who have

104 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tested themselves and their followers, by a plunge
■ into India. Some of the greatest names in Eng-
lish history won their first distinction in India,
and Napoleon would have followed Alexander,
and landed in India after Egypt, had not his
plans gone awry. As soon as a soldier suc-
ceeded in consolidating his power, anywhere
from China on the East, to Persia on the west, of
the northern frontier of India, he swooped down
upon India, penetrated as far into the interior
as he dared, and made off with as much booty
as he could carry.

After the Greeks under Alexander, who en-
tered India in 327 B. C, and who, by the way,
left traces of their art in the various vases, coins,
caskets, and other ornaments found since, and
also in the fine Greek features of many of the
images of Buddha, came a people from Central
Asia, whom the historians, for want of a better
name, call Scythians. They are said to have
driven out the Greek dynasty from the Bactrian
Kingdom on the northwest of the Himalayas, and
at about the beginning of the Christian era they
founded a strong monarchy in Northern India,
and just beyond. Their most famous king was
named Kanishka, and we shall hear of him later
on as an enthusiastic disciple of Buddha. These
Scythians continued to swarm across the Him-

THE GREAT MUGHAL 105

alayas, and into Northern India for several cen-
turies, meeting and defeating, or being driven
back by one after another of the Indian kings.

As early as the middle of the seventh century,
began the invasions of a people who left their
mark upon India as no other people have done.
Muhammad, who was born in 570 A. D., left
to the world a fiery faith, with which the world
is not done yet. The Bombay coast was near
enough to tempt these religious soldiers, and on
one pretext or another they began their inva-
sions of India, which were to result finally in a
series of Muhammadan rulers in India, such as
India had not had before, nor will ever have
again.

Mahmud of Ghanzi invaded India no less
than seventeen times. After a quarter of a cen-
tury of fighting his small kingdom of Afghanis-
tan was increased to include the Punjab. These
Muhammadan conquerors, who one after an-
other down to the time of Babar 1482-1530 A. D.,
fought their way into more and more territory
in India, were of the same religion, and the
same fanatical enthusiasm as those who had
fought their way through Asia, Africa, Spain,
and into southern France, and whose capital at
Bagdad was at one time the commercial, artis-
tic, scholarly, and political centre of the world.

106 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Stopped at last in France, the fury of conquest
expended itself upon India. Names, dates, de-
tails of their gradual occupation of, and sover-
eignty over, almost the whole of India, will not
be necessary to the readers of these papers. I
have not the slightest intention of writing more
than the scantiest outline of history, merely trust-
ing thereby to give a setting for the rough picture
which I am painting. But of six of these Mu-
hammadan invaders, Babar, Hamayun, Akbar,
Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, it is
necessary to know something to understand the
India of to-day, even though one be only a trav-
eller looking at monuments, and nervously trying
to keep his finger on the right page of his guide-
book as he goes along.

Their influence, their monuments, their sys-
tem of land tenure, revenue, and taxation, their
customs and habits, and even their social moral-
ity, remain visible to-day. Lucknow, Delhi,
Agra, Benares, Lahore, Peshawar, and the Khai-
bar Pass, are still all alive with their wealth,
their devotion, and their daintiness and daring
as builders.

Timur, better known as Tamerlane, at the
head of a united body of Tartars, came down
through the Afghan passes about 1400 A. D.,
entered Delhi, massacred the inhabitants for five

THE GREAT MUGHAL 107

days, held a feast in honor of his victory, and
returned again to Central Asia, Sixth in de-
scent from him was the Mughal, Babar, who in-
vaded India in 1526. He writes in that remark-
able Diary of his: "Hindustan is a country that
has few pleasures to recommend it. The people
are not handsome. They have no idea of the
charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing to-
gether, or of familiar intercourse. They have
no genius, no politeness of manner, no kindness
or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical in-
vention in planning or executing their handi-
craft works, no skill or knowledge in design or
architecture, they have no good horses, no good
flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits,
no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in
their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no
torches, not even a candlestick." When Babar
arrived he found India fought over by native
Indian rulers, and by numerous Muhammadan
rulers, fighting each for his own land, or joining
forces here and there in an effort to found a state
which should insure breathing space.

These kingdoms exhausted themselves in
quarrels amongst themselves, to such an extent,
that when the Mughal emperors appeared they
found them an easy prey. Changiz IChan and
Timur were both ancestors of Babar. His

108 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST

grandfather the Khan of the Mongols, though
seventy years old at the time, came without
thought of age or distance, to bear his congratu-
lations on the news of his birth. The grand-
mother was likewise a woman of spirit. Her
husband was defeated in battle and she was
handed over as part of the booty to one of the
oflBcers of the conqueror. She raised no objec-
tions, but once her new master was in her apart-
ments, the door was locked, she and her maids
stabbed him to death and flung his body into
the street. Then to the conqueror she sent the
message: "Contrary to law you gave me an-
other man, and I slew him. Come and slay me
if you choose!" Babar had forebears of spirit.
Babar kept a diary. He lived in the time of
Henry VII and Michelangelo and Copernicus.
He tells us in much detail the story of his life.
Only from 1519 till 1530 was he in India. His
early days were days of hardship, adventure,
war, and sport. He took them as they came.
He never whined, he never explained, and he
loved life in a most unoriental way, and was the
most romantic figure of his day. He was more
the type of the adventurous sailors of Queen
Elizabeth's day, than any Oriental we know. He
was a great sportsman, a bold horseman and
swimmer, and of abounding vitality and good

THE GREAT MUGHAL 109

humor. He loved life, even the eating and
drinking part of it, and as is always the case
with such suitors, life loved him. From Babar's
coming in 1526 to the death of Aurangzeb in
1706, India was to a larger extent than ever be-
fore, under one ruler. It should be added that
at no time even then was India entirely con-
quered, or completely under the sway of one
Government, as it is to-day under the English.

Babar defeated the Delhi sovereign, entered
Delhi, received the allegiance of the Muhamma-
dans, was attacked by the Rajputs, defeated
them near Agra, and when he died his power
extended as far south as lower Bengal. His son
Humayun, who succeeded him, was obliged to
divide his inheritance with his brother, handing
over to him Kabul. It was from Afghanistan
that Babar had drawn his fighting men, and
Humayun deprived of this, the main recruiting
ground of his army, was attacked by the descend-
ants of those earlier Afghan invaders, who hated
the new Muhammadan rulers as much as they
hated the Hindus. Finally, after years of fight-
ing to hold his place, he was driven out of India
by the famous Sher Shah, the governor of
Bengal.

In 1556 the son of Humayun, then only four-
teen years old, and in many ways the greatest of

no THE WEST IN THE EAST

all the Mughal rulers, and the real founder of the
Mughal Empire in India, defeated the army of
the Sher Shah ruler, and his father Humayun re-
turned again to India, but only to reign for a
few months at Delhi, and to die in 1556.

Akbar succeeded his father, and reigned for
close upon fifty years, from 1556 until 1605, his
reign corresponding almost exactly to that of
Queen Elizabeth, 1558-1603. He was the great-
est ruler India has ever had. He welded a chaos
of nations, tribes, religions, and petty chiefs and
kings, into an empire. His great finance min-
ister Raja Todar Mall, who was a Hindu, made
the first survey and the first regular land settle-
ment of India, and adjusted the taxation. Ak-
bar gave the Hindus equal place and power, and
played off the Hindus against the Mughal chiefs.
He married the daughter of the Maharaja of
Jaipur, and his son married the granddaughter
of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. His careful system
of police, judges, and rulers of provinces helped
to make his rule both just and effective. He
did away with the tax on non-Mussulmans, and
he and his son and grandson were the builders
of practically all the monuments which remain
to make India famous to-day.

This line of princes are as well-known in In-
dia as are the names of Elizabeth, Henry the

THE GREAT MUGHAL 111

Eighth, Charles the First, and Cromwell in Eng-
land. They introduced Persian poets and print-
ers, and men of letters from foreign lands. They
were the Medici of India. The last of this great
line of Timur died in Rangoon, as a prisoner
of the British, in 1862. Their connection with
India lasted, therefore, for more than four hun-
dred and fifty years, or from nearly a hundred
years before America was discovered, until with-
in two years of the close of the war of secession.
The only time that India has come near being
India was under their rule.

It is along the lines laid down by Akbar that
the British have worked, in the matter of land
tenure and taxation. The total revenue of Ak-
bar was estimated at forty-two million sterling,
or about three times the amount demanded at
the present time from the land. He built the
tomb of his father Humayun near Delhi, the
town of Fatehpur-Sikri, near Agra, in many
ways the most interesting ruins in India, the
fort at Allahabad, the palace at Lahore, and the
red palace in the fort at Agra.

It was the Europeans who visited India at
this time who brought back the expression, which
still endures as a description of human splen-
dor: "The Great Mughal!" Toward the end
of his life, his tolerance drifted into scepticism.

112 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and he promulgated a new state religion, which
was supposed to combine the best from all re-
ligions, with Akbar as its prophet, or the head of
the church. He was accused finally of even per-
mitting worship of himself, a crime, be it said,
of which great politicals are accused to this day,
and we all know with how little reason ! Akbar
died in 1605, and is buried in the splendid tomb
at Sikandra, some five miles from Agra canton-
ment.

It was during his reign that three Englishmen
arrived with a letter from their Queen, Eliza-
beth. They were John Newbery, Ralph Fitch,
and William Leedes. John Newbery was lost
somewhere on his travels, Leedes, who was a
jeweller, remained as court stone-cutter, and
Fitch returned to England. It was through his
reports of the opportunities awaiting the trader
in India, that the first commercial ventures from
England were started. He it was in short who
gave the signal for the formation of commercial
companies to exploit India, with the result that
India is governed by England to-day.

Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir,
who reigned from 1605 till 1627. He carried on
a series of wars in southern India, and lost the
province of Kandahar to the Persians. Jahan-
gir turned from his father's new-fangled faith.

THE GREAT MUGHAL 113

and personally conducted ritual, to the orthodox
observances of Islam. He must have been a wag
of terrifying prowess, since it is told of him that
after a night of drunken revelry with some of
his courtiers, one of them reminded him the next
morning of what had happened. Jahangir asked
the man who his companions had been in such
a disgraceful debauch, then called them before
him and had them beaten so severely that one
of them died. He himself died in the midst of
a rebellion against him, led by his son Shah
Jahan. Jahangir built the tomb of Anar Kali
at Lahore, and the tomb of Itimad-ud-daulah
at Agra, who was a Persian named Ghiyas Beg,
Jahangir's father-in-law, and the grandfather of
the wife of Shah Jahan, whose tomb is the most
wonderful in the world. The mightiest factor
for good in Jahangir's life was his wife, Nun
Jahan. He loved her twenty years and then
killed her husband to get her, and, what is per-
haps more astonishing still, he never regretted
it. In 1603 Sir Thomas Roe, the first English
ambassador to India, presented his letters to Ja-
hangir from James I.

Shah Jahan was emperor of Delhi from 1628 till
1658, just about the time the Pilgrims and Puri-
tans were making their first settlements in Ameri-
ca. While they were building schools and

114 THE WEST IN THE EAST

churches of logs hewn into shape with the axe; at
about the time indeed when the oldest meeting-
house in America, which has been used consecu-
tively for public worship, was building, now
known as the "Old Meeting-House," in Hingham,
Massachusetts, this Indian Emperor was plan-
ning the building of the most magnificent capital
in the world. No courtier in Delhi, or in Agra,
and no citizen of Hingham at that time, imagined
that the simple slate grave-stones in the cemetery
at Hingham would mark the beginnings of a
more lasting state than the jewelled tombs of
Agra and Delhi.

Toward the end of his father's reign, Shah
Jahan was a refugee and a rebel, conspiring
against his own father. After coming to the
throne he murdered his brother, Shahriyar, and
all the other members of the house of Akbar
who might become rivals to the throne. Dur-
ing the whole of his reign his armies were at
work defending, attacking, and losing or winning
territory. He is said to have been just to his
people, blameless in his habits, a good financier,
and by far the greatest man of his day in all the
East. He built the Great Mosque or Jama
Masjid, at Delhi, the Palace — what is now the
Fort — also at Delhi, which contains the Court
of Private Audience or Diwan-i-Khas, and the

THE GREAT MUGHAL 115

Pearl Mosque or Moti-Masjid. The famous
Peacock Throne in his Audience Hall in the
Fort at Delhi, with its tail shimmering in the
natural colors of rubies, diamonds, sapphires,
and emeralds, was valued by the jeweller Tav-
ernier at thirty-five million dollars. If he had
done nothing else, his name would have been re-
rnembered in India, but he did more than this.
He stamped the whole world of architectural
beauty with his private seal when he built the
Taj Mahal.

Elsewhere one may read of the vivid incon-
gruities of India, but what of this : I have just been
the guest, at a splendid camp, where some seven
hundred people were entertained for four days
by one of the most enlightened native rulers in
India. This ruler is a woman. Her Highness
Sultan Begum of Bhopal. Here in India one
finds a woman ruling with tact, with force, and
with success. Here in India I have seen women
actually catching in their hands the dung as it
fell from the cattle, pressing it into cakes, car-
rying it off on their heads, to dry it at home
for fuel. Here in India too is the most marvel-
lous memorial to a woman ever built by hu-
man hands. Woman at her highest, woman at
her lowest, woman immortalized, and all here in
India.

116 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The Taj Mahal is the exquisite mausoleum
built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favorite
wife Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, or
"Light of the Palace." It stands on a platform
of marble, twenty feet high, and three hundred
feet square. The tomb itself measures one hun-
dred and eighty-six feet on each side, and the
dome over the centre is two hundred feet high.
It is one of the most wonderful things I have seen
in the world. I saw it for the first time just as
the sun was setting, leaving it with the purple
curtain of the horizon all about it. It looked as
though a Titan had taken a huge piece of ivory
satin, embroidered it, encrusted it with jewels,
stiffened it into shape, and set it in the sky. It
seemed quite as though it might fade, or float,
away. The first clod of dry earth that falls upon
a coffin must seem like the weight of a planet to
some one, but here are tons of marble and not an
ounce of weight. If you could blow bubbles of
mother-of-pearl they would not shine more softly,
or float more lightly, than the minarets and domes
of this tomb. Here is a tomb that might float
away with the spirit of the body to which it gives
a home. It looks as though you might hold it
up on your outstretched hand.

It is the only building in the world that makes
one wish to pat it, smooth it, touch it, as though

THE GREAT MUGHAL 117

it had the soft skin of a woman. It is not
something you see; you feel it, hear it, taste it.
I put my hand against the marble. It was
warm, it seemed to have texture and quality, as
though it were the covering of something alive.
I have never seen any other building that re-
sembled it, or reminded me of it — and only
one woman.

Inside, underneath the great marble dome, are
the two marble tombs of Shah Jahan and his
wife, and there the marble is like lace, so cun-
ningly is it carved, with flowers inlaid in color,
the colors being made of precious stones, agate,
cornelian, lapis-lazuli. One can readily believe
that it cost ten millions of dollars and twenty-two
years of labor to make this casket.

No other woman in the world has been praised
in marble and jewels as is this woman, and no
other woman ever can be. There have been
greater men, and lovelier women, doubtless, and
countless men who have loved as much, and
many, no doubt, who have loved more, but every
man who has loved a woman must envy this man
for having done what he would wish to, but may
not do !

Around the two tombs is a screen of marble.
You can look through it, as you can look through
a cobweb. There are scrolls and flowers, and

118 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the petals and leaves of each flower are of col-
ored precious stones, inlaid in the marble.

We Occidentals use urns and crosses and
broken columns. This man put a diadem of
brilliants on the brow of memory, as if to say:
This is not something buried or broken or to
be forgotten, but rather something complete and
never to be forgotten, and it never will be! He
was right. When a man has really loved once,
he has been eaten up by it. After that it does
not matter how often, or how soon, he dies.
"Home is not a hearth but a woman."

Poor Shah Jahan, as he had rebelled against
his father Jahangir, so he in his turn suffered
from the intrigues and rebellion of his family. He
fell ill. His son Aurangzeb murdered his broth-
ers, and proclaimed himself emperor in 1658. He
imprisoned his father and kept him in close con-
finement in the Fort at Agra till he died in 1666.

I am sitting now, as I write, where Shah Jahan
used to sit as a prisoner in his own palace. I can
see the Taj Mahal, as he used to see it two hun-
dred and fifty years ago.

As he looked across at those minarets and at
that dome, he probably thought his life a fail-
ure, and yet every man who sits where I am sit-
ting must envy him such a success. All that the
world of his generation had to give had been

THE GREAT MUGHAL 119

poured into a cup and lifted to his lips every day,
and he had probably envied the man who was
genuinely thirsty, that he might enjoy it. Now he
is deserted and alone, and his cup, full of success
and adulation, is in the hands of his rebellious
son, who carries the key of his prison-house in his
girdle, and mocks him. All he has left is his
daily vision of the tomb of his wife, the Taj Ma-
hal. One can pay this building no higher hom-
age than to say that one envies Shah Jahan even
then!

There are other buildings in Agra. There is
the great Fort, with its circuit of nearly a mile, and
its huge sandstone walls nearly seventy feet high,
built by Akbar. Within these walls is a mosque,
also built by Shah Jahan, called the Pearl
Mosque, the Hall of Public Audience, the Gem
Mosque, used by the ladies of the court, the Hall
of Private Audience, and the miniature mosque,
called the Mina Masjid, in which the Emperor
made his devotions, and the splendid sandstone
palace, and so on.

He must have revelled in building, and for-
tunately there were eyes that dreamed beauty,
and sure hands to make buildings of the dreams
to do his bidding. No one before, and no one
after, till the British took possession, was more
completely master of India than Shah Jahan.

120 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The Mughal Emperors culminated in Shah Ja-
han, and their pinnacle is the Taj Mahal.

As long ago as 1398 Timur, or Tamerlane, as
he is better known to us, poured his hordes of
followers through the Afghan passes from Tar-
tary. Shah Jahan's grandfather Akbar, was the
sixth in descent from this barbarian warrior.
One wonders who and what our first ances-
tors could have been, who drifted over the world
from Central Asia, and whose descendants built
the Acropolis, the Forum, the cathedrals and
churches of Italy and France, Germany, and
England, and the Taj Mahal in India. At any
rate one is proud to be of that Aryan stock.

The last of this great line of Mughal emper-
ors, who really held India together, was Aurang-
zeb, who proclaimed himself emperor while his
father Shah Jahan was still living. He ruled
from 1658 till 1707. His reign began in rebellion
against his father, and ended in the rebellion of
his own sons against him. He devoted practi-
cally his whole forty-nine "years as a ruler to the
conquest of southern India, and for the last half
of the time he was in the field himself at the head
of a huge, and what proved to be an unwieldy,
army.

A new power had sprung up in the south,
known as the Maratha Confederacy, and Au-

THE GREAT MUGHAL 121

rangzeb, who had become a bitter and partisan
Muhammadan, lost the friendly co-operation of
Hindu generals and Hindu viceroys, who had
helped to consolidate the Mughal power under
Akbar.

The religious sect of the Hindus, the Sikhs
in the north, the Marathas in the south, and the
Rajputs in the west, now hemmed in, and grad-
ually dismembered, the great Mughal Empire
in India. As we shall see later, it was from the
Marathas and the Sikhs and not from the Mug-
hals, that the British took control of India. Au-
rangzeb by his stubborn policy put India again
into the hands of bigoted Hinduism and big-
oted Islamism, from which Akbar had wrenched
it clear.

While this great empire was falling to pieces
in the hands of the feeble successors of these six
great emperors, other enemies appeared.

The Persian king, Nadir Shah, held a carni-
val of slaughter and debauchery in 1739, last-
ing nearly two months, in and around Delhi, and
is said to have carried away with him booty, in-
cluding the peacock throne, to the value of one
hundred and fifty millions of dollars.

The Afghans, time and time again, poured
through the now unprotected passes, and burned,
and sacked, and slew. The whole borderland

122 THE WEST IN THE EAST

between northern India and Afghanistan was
swept bare of wealth and of people, and lay bar-
ren for years. It was during this time of an-
archy, and internecine fighting, if fighting be-
tween such diversified inhabitants of the same
country may be described as internecine, that
the British began patching together piece by
piece, what is to-day their Indian Empire. While
the others were quarrelling and fighting over re-
ligious, social, political, and hereditary shadows,
the British bull-dog walked off with the bone.
He was not permitted to enjoy it in peace for
years. The last war with the Marathas was not
ended till 1818, and the Sikhs were not con-
quered by the British till 1849.

That eminent and satisfactory historian of the
Indian peoples. Sir William WUson Hunter,
writes: "Akbar had rendered a great empire
possible in India by conciliating the native Hindu
races. He thus raised up a powerful third party,
consisting of the native military peoples of In-
dia, which enabled him alike to prevent new
Muhammadan invasions from Central Asia, and
to keep in subjection his own Muhammadan
governors of provinces. Under Aurangzeb and
his miserable successors, this wise policy of
conciliation was given up. Accordingly, new
Muhammadan hordes soon swept down from

THE GREAT MUGHAL 123

Afghanistan; the Muhammadan Governors of
Indian provinces set themselves up as indepen-
dent potentates; and the warHke Hindu races,
who had helped Akbar to create the Mughal
Empire, became, under his foolish posterity the
chief agents of its ruin."

When Columbus discovered America, he was
trying to find a sea -passage to India. He car-
ried in his pocket a letter from his sovereign to
the Khan of Tartary !

When Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa,
and discovered the sea route to India in 1498,
he turned the whole current of power and com-
merce. The Arabs had made Bagdad the centre
of trade between the East and the Mediterranean
nations. As early as the year 931 A. D., exam-
inations of candidates for permission to practise
medicine were held at Bagdad, which was
already then a centre not only of commerce,
but of culture. The Crusaders made certain
Italian cities, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, rich,
because it was through them that these multi-
tudes poured on their way to the East. They
did the transporting of men and stores and
horses. At the height of their power the Tabula
Amalfitana were the sea laws for the whole Medi-
terranean. When Pisa, Amalfi, and finally Genoa
were subjugated by their rivals, Venice became

124 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the world's great sea-power, and also the centre
of the world's commerce and the world's art and
culture. Her ships covered the sea, and she
numbered her sailors in tens of thousands. Find-
ing that the through journey was too long, the
Venetians arranged with the northern towns of
Europe to make one town, lying between Italy
and the traders of the north, a centre or store-
house, where exchange of goods might be con-
veniently effected. They agreed to make Bruges
that centre, and thereafter Bruges in the north,
and Venice in the south, handled the trade of
the world.

Vasco da Gama's discovery came like a magic
wand to change all this. It was cheaper to trade
by way of the newly discovered sea-route, and
Lisbon, lying half-way between East and West,
became the great market of the world, and by
far the most potent Western factor in the East.
There followed the tremendous war between
Spain, which had conquered Portugal in 1580,
and those great trading towns of the north then
centred in Holland. For nearly a hundred
years the war raged between Spain and HoUand,
and at the end of it, or the beginning of the sev-
enteenth century, the Dutch were masters of
the world. New York was Dutch, Brazil was
Dutch, India was Dutch, and the Cape of Good

THE GREAT MUGHAL 125

Hope was Dutch, and of course the Eastern trade
was Dutch. The Thirty Years' War and the
civil war in England only made them stronger,
till one wonders why the Dutch rather than the
British did not become a great empire.

But a "fat soil," a "wealthy community,"
bred a race of what would now be 9alled "Lit-
tle Hollanders." No one, they thought, would
dare attack the world-power which had swept
Spain oflf the seas. No doubt there were poli-
ticians to tell the people that the huge navy was
an incubus, that more money was wanted for the
poor, where so many were rich, and that the era
of peace had come at last. Certainly that psalm-
singing, devout Protestant across the North Sea,
Cromwell, who was training an army and build-
ing a navy, merely of course to protect the com-
merce of England, was the last man to be sus-
pected of designs upon Holland. Was he not
continually saying that his army and his navy
were merely brought into existence to preserve
peace! When all was ready, and the Dutch pol-
iticians had succeeded in rendering Holland fully
unprepared for war, this man of prayer, and
psalm, and Bible, struck his blow in 1652, and
Holland lost her empire, lost her mastery of the
sea, lost her commercial supremacy, and all be-
cause she was fat and rich.

126 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Cromwell's navigation laws were what are now
known, and reviled, as high tariff laws. By
Cromwell's Navigation Act all goods of every
description, wherever grown or manufactured,
were to be imported into Great Britain only in
ships belonging to British subjects, of which the
master and a majority of the crew were British
bom ; and all goods produced in Europe must be
brought into Great Britain either in British bot-
toms, or in ships belonging to that country in
which they were actually produced. The Dutch
were exporters of cheese, but had been carrying
the trade of the world in their ships!

It is easy to see against whom the new Navi-
gation Act was aimed. There followed an enor-
mous expansion in British foreign trade, which
has never ceased to grow from that day until
within the last few years.

When a man arms himself with the Bible, and
clothes himself in the shining armor of scripture,
look out for him! One seems to be able to
strike more suddenly, more unexpectedly, and
more fiercely with that weapon than with any
other.

England's greatness began and grew under
Protection. France on land, and England on
the sea, destroyed utterly the Dutch commercial
supremacy, and then for a century England and

THE GREAT MUGHAL 127

France fought for the mastery of the sea, for the
trade of the East, for commercial supremacy.
Finally at Waterloo the mastery was gained, and
the British Empire has had plain sailing from
that day till within the last few years.

There are few more exciting stories than this
history of the fight for the commercial empire of
the world, which ended in England's becoming
the trader, the manufacturer, the ship-builder, the
ship-owner, the banker, and the policeman of
the world. It is a tempting task to fit in illus-
trations, to make comparisons, to point to the
beginnings of similar weaknesses, and parallel
examples of rottenness here and there in the
social and political fabric of other great imperial
powers, which seem to unfold prophecies for the
future, but I leave that to the Englishman. I am
not his Cassandra. This whisp of the history of
commerce is given here merely to introduce "The
Governor and Company of Merchants of London
trading to the East Indies," better known as the
English East India Company, or the "John
Company," who started business with one hun-
dred and twenty-five shareholders, and a capital
of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The man with that amount of capital is not
considered a rich man in London or New York
to-day. Nonetheless it was this trading com-

128 THE WEST IN THE EAST

pany who won, and held, and turned over to the
British crown, the empire of India.

The Portuguese and the Dutch fought them
in the beginning, the French fought them later,
and one power after another succumbed to them
in India itself. By the middle of the eighteenth
century all European opposition was at an end,
and by the middle of the nineteenth century
India itself was practically in their hands and
under their control. To be quite accurate, 1783,
and the peace of Versailles, marks the date when
the maritime powers of Europe withdrew from all
serious rivalry in conquest or commerce with
England in India. After that date the contest
is wholly between England and the native rulers
for ascendancy in India.

The first territorial possession of the East In-
dia Company was Madras, and the site upon
which Fort St. George was built was bought
from the Raja of Chandragiri in 1639. In 1661
Bombay was turned over to the English crown
by the Portuguese, as part of the dowry of Cath-
erine of Braganza, the queen of Charles II., and
in 1668 King Charles sold his rights to the East
India Company for an annual payment of fifty
dollars! In 1700, the company bought from a
son of the Emperor Aurangzeb certain villages,
which were united to form what is now Calcutta.

THE GREAT MUGHAL 129

Two men whose names are seldom mentioned,
and rarely seen, gained for English commerce al-
most the first legal foothold in India, The ship
surgeon, Gabriel Broughton, who cured Shah
Jahan's daughter when she was badly burned;
when asked to name his fee, requested that the
East India Company might be allowed to trade
in Bengal free of all duty.

The staff surgeon, William Hamilton, who
when the court physicians had failed, cured the
Emperor Farokshir of a tumor in the back in
1715, asked for the thirty odd villages surround-
ing the Company's factory near Calcutta, and
for some villages near Madras, which gave the
English control of both these ports. British
commerce leaves Hamilton's tombstone neg-
lected in Calcutta, and nobody even knows
where Broughton's bones lie!

The transfer of the supreme power of India
from the grasp of the Great Mughal to this little
company of English traders, makes a story as
brilliant and adventurous as any story in history.

The rise of British power in India virtually be-
gins in 1745, and the two great names are those
of Clive and Hastings. One died a suicide, and
the other after an impeachment lasting seven
years was completely impoverished. There are
men in India to-day, and fine fellows they are.

130 THE WEST IN THE EAST

risking their health and their lives, and those of
their families, to keep India for England, and
there are almost as many voluble orators at home
making it as diflScult as they can for them. There
are so many people nowadays who think this
a topsy-turvy world because they are underneath,
not realizing that the world would be upside-
down indeed if they were not, that governing,
particularly the governing of alien peoples, has
become increasingly difficult.

In the days of Clive and Hastings, and for
about one hundred years after, there was no rail-
way, nor cable, nor Suez Canal. The man on
the spot was authoritative and responsible. The
Oriental is still unable to understand divided au-
thority, authority dictated from an unseen source.
It may be safely said that had the present govern-
mental machinery been in existence in 1745, In-
dia might never have become a fief of the British
Crown. It is sometimes fatal to interfere even
when a man is making mistakes. Interference
may poison the mistakes with lack of confidence,
tUl they wilt into abject and costly failure.
While mistakes may teach a man, interference
always bewilders him and those under him.

After the death of Aurangzeb, a new power,
the Marathas, though of Hindu origin, with their
home in the plains east of Bombay, overran, and

THE GREAT MUGHAL 131

practically took possession of, northern and cen-
tral India. Sivaji, their great leader, began his
pillaging crusades even before the death of Au-
rangzeb. After his death a Brahman family,
whose head took the title of Peshwa, led these
people, and carried on for a hundred years a
contest with the British. The great principali-
ties of Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and Nagpur,
the rulers of three of which I am shortly to visit,
were the centres of this power.

The Sikhs, now some of the best soldiers in the
Indian army, also maintained for nearly seventy-
five years a sovereignty of their own in the Pun-
jab, and were only finally disposed of as rivals to
the British in 1849.

Of the Europeans, who from the beginning of
the seventeenth century had attempted the ex-
ploitation of the commerce of India, the Portu-
guese, the Dutch, the Danes had disappeared,
and when Clive appeared upon the scene, only
the French remained as formidable rivals. The
battles of Wandiwash, of the famous Plassey, of
Buxar, all fought between 1757 and 1764, ended
the French rivalry, and the British were left to
deal with the problem of subduing what remained
of opposition in India itself.

Another quarter of a century passed before
Wellesley, later the great Duke of Wellington,

132 THE WEST IN THE EAST

finally disposed of the Maratha confederacy; and
it was not till 1856, when Lord Dalhousie, prob-
ably the greatest of all the governor-generals of
India, having annexed the Punjab in 1849, took
over control of the kingdom of Oudh, roughly
the territory about Lucknow, that the map of
India became what it is to-day. It was Dal-
housie who wrote just before taking this grave
step: "With this feeling on my mind, and in
humble reliance on the blessing of the Almighty
(for millions of His creatures will draw freedom
and happiness from the change) , I approach the
execution of this duty gravely and not without
solicitude, but calmly and without doubt." The
next year, 1857, was the year of the Mutiny!

I quote this passage because I wish to call at-
tention to what I believe to have been the secret
of England's success in India. This success has
been accounted for in many ways. It was com-
mercial greed, say some critics ; it was brute force ;
it was the leverage of power that Great Brit-
ain had gained first in Europe, write the histori-
ans. The first steps were, if you please, along
the path of commercial greed, but later when
the severe work of administration, pacification,
and consolidation was done, it was quite another
force that crowned the work. The civil service
was recruited by examination from the Bible-

THE GREAT MUGHAL 133

reading upper and middle-class of Great Britain;
game-playing, adventurous and healthy, but at
bottom duty-loving young barbarians, who be-
lieved that India was delivered into their hands
to be saved from itself.

The first and foremost of them was Clive, a
tall, silent, rather morose English lad, who began
his career by accusing an officer of cheating at
cards. There followed a duel. Clive missed, his
adversary held his pistol to Clive's head and
bade him beg for his life and retract his accusa-
tion. "Fire and be damned to you! I said you
cheated and you did. I'll never pay you!" was
the reply.

There have been hundreds of lesser Clives in
India since that day, and to them is due the con-
quest and peaceful government of India, more
than to any other one force.

Imagine the United States of America peopled
by Sioux, Apaches, Mexicans, and Negroes. Im-
agine some Mughal conqueror arriving by the
Behring Straits, and after centuries subduing this
conglomeration of fighters, factions, religions,
and languages. Pampered and rich, the conquer-
ors lose control. The land is covered with small
principalities. There is a king in Florida, an-
other in Mexico, another in Massachusetts, and
there are armed bands of Mexican bandits, of

134 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Apache raiders, of Sioux freebooters. Imagine
the country filled with jewels, brocades, silks,
gold, silver, stored up for centuries by an indus-
trious, uncommercial people, who had never
learned to spend, and whose rich lived almost
as simply as the poor. Something like that state
of affairs is what the British had to deal with
when Clive saw that merely to win a battle here
and there was not enough, but that if the British
were to stay in safety, they must have sovereign
rights over the land itself. They now control the
whole million and a half square miles.

IV

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON

ON landing at Bombay one discovers that
no experience of travel elsewhere has
prepared the way. The luxuries are dif-
ferent, the hardships are different, the whole set-
ting of life is different. I am greeted on the
landing-stage by a lean, chocolate-colored Indian,
in flowing robes and a huge white turban, who
presents a letter from a soldier friend in Luck-
now, who has engaged him as servant or "bear-
er" for our tour. He is solemnity personified,
and his eyes are brown depths of unfathomable
impenetrability. During the many weeks he was
with us, I saw him smile but once. We were
driving at Delhi, he was sitting on the box with
the coachman. One of the ponies became frac-
tious and landed one of his heels on the shin of
the driver, who howled with pain, Heera Tall
smiled, but even then there was no light, no keen-
ness of joy or sorrow in his eyes. What he
thought about this incident, or what he thought
about anybody or anything else, I shall never

135

136 THE WEST IN THE EAST

know, but I conclude that it was not of much
importance.

It is the easy habit both of those who have
lived long in India, and of those who merely trot
through India, to describe the people as inscru-
table, and to assume that there are depths of
thought and feeling behind the unknown tongue,
and the unchanging eyes, which are too subtle
for the Western mind. It occurs to the traveller
sometimes that this is a mistake. There is a
great difference between the indefinite and the in-
definable. It is possible that India is not so much
inscrutable as faded. This old, old civiliza-
tion may have been printed so often from the
same type that the lettering is now blurred and
indecipherable. It may be illegible, too, be-
cause the font of type conveys nothing very in-
telligent or profound even to the users thereof.

Because there was a great literature in India
two thousand years B. C; a well-authenticated
philosophy worked out into a considered system
five hundred years B, C; a Sanskrit grammar
compiled about 350 B. C, which is still the
foundation for all study of the Aryan language;
an astronomy which had succeeded in making a
fairly correct calculation of the solar year, 2000
B. C; the discoveries of notation both by frac-
tions and algebra; a system of medicine, with

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 137

hospitals and dissecting-rooms; an art of music,
with its seven notes, invented 500 B. C; a code
of law, the Code of Manu, put into its present
form about 400 A. D.; and a vast collection of
legends and stories in verse, the Mahabharata,
the main story dealing with a period not later than
1200 B. C, because all this is the fruit of the
soil of India, one is perhaps tempted to overrate
what exists of intellectual prowess to-day. The
inscrutability may be emptiness rather than depth.

My singular opinion on this subject was not
derived from a study of the bearer, Heera Tall,
alone, for his patient inscrutability was, I am
now convinced, merely a veil of depravity. He
knew that what he knew and thought about was
best left to the idealism of the cloudiest possible
haziness.

I was honored with the opportunity to know
barristers, journalists, soldiers, native officials
and judges, teachers, holy men, small landhold-
ers, peasants, monks, princes, and educated wo-
men, while in India, and I conclude that indefi-
niteness, rather than profundity, describes their
education and their philosophy of life. It is not
only in India, and at this present time, that easy-
going and rather flabby intellects have been will-
ing to accept the high-flown, the turgid, and the
indefinite as wonderful and weighty.

138 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The bluster of the demagogue appeals to the
many, and the mental gyrations of the transcen-
dental lecturer to fashionable women appeal to
them, at any rate so long as they do not under-
stand him. Ignotum fro magnifico, applies in
the West as well as in the East. It is almost
incredible, as an example of this, that Emerson
should have said of Bronson Alcott and his silly
"all things are spiral," that Alcott's was the
greatest philosophic mind since Plato. There
are even fewer men who have minds of their
own than have fortunes of their own. We are all
directly descended intellectually from Animism,
and the clouds and mists, the distortions and
noises of the mind are accepted with awe by
most of us, as mysteries too deep for us, when as
a matter of fact what is not clear is generally the
result of lazy thinking, rather than the exploit of
an intellect dealing with matters too high for us.

Of the religion and ideals of the overwhelm-
ing majority of the people, I have written, and it
seems to be a fatigued philosophy, and a blurred
idealism, which animate even the leaders. The
climate, and the habits which necessarily follow,
tend to drowsiness, rather than to alertness and
well-defined wants and wishes.

Even the progressive men and women of In-
dia are still steeped in the atmosphere of autoc-

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 139

racy. They fumble badly with the new scheme
of government, brought to them by their pres-
ent rulers, the English. England's greatness is
due in no small degree to the fact that she has
held stubbornly to the belief, despite republics
and revolutions, that all men are not equal, nor
all entitled to an equal degree of liberty, but all
entitled to an equal degree of justice. France
substituted a sham equality for constitutional
liberty, and the results are seen in that country
to-day in the hateful and hampering tyrannies
of bureaucracy. England goes so far as to de-
clare by law that her people are not equal, but
she administers justice to all alike, with an im-
partiality and a rigidity unknown anywhere else
in the world. Equality is a sham, justice is a
reality. Equality has never been realized, jus-
tice has been done. One is purely theoretical,
the other practical. England thus far has pre-
ferred the possible reality to the impossible sham,
with the result that her citizens have more per-
sonal liberty, and are more unfettered in their
activities, than the citizens of any other country.
I found few, even among the educated in In-
dia, who wanted justice. What they called jus-
tice I found meant nearly always preference.
The unrest and sedition in India are entangled
in this mesh of misunderstanding, and their

140 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Western sympathizers are unwittingly making
matters worse, by using words which mean one
thing to them, and another thing to those to
whom they are addressed. It should not be
forgotten in studying them that their attitude
toward the science of government is as old and
as deeply bedded in their brains as their lit-
erature, their astronomy, and their religion.
Thousands of years of dampening of individual
effort, of trusting to cunning, to bribery, to in-
sidious influence, have distorted all notions of
justice. They suffer from what Lord Curzon
admirably phrases as the "immemorial curse of
Oriental nations, the trail of the serpent that is
found everywhere from Stamboul to Peking —
the vicious incubus of officialism, paramount,
selfish, domineering, and corrupt. Distrust of
private enterprise is rooted in the mind trained
up to believe that the government is everything
and the individual nothing."

One's boyhood notions of Clive and Hastings,
and of the " John Company," are at once modi-
fied. An hour on shore in Bombay is enough.
Even the light is diflferent. It is like that white
light, so purely artificial, in which you are placed
by the photographer when he asks you to as-
sume a natural expression. The effect upon you
at the photographer's, and upon everybody in

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 141

India, is the same: in defending yourself from
the light you assume a concealing expression.
Thousands of years of this light have done more
than we think, probably, to produce the inscruta-
bility so much talked of, and which may after
all be mainly physical.

Another consequence of this hot white light
is that one's clothes are piled on the head to pro-
tect the brain. Most of the natives in the streets
have more yards of stuff on their heads than on
their bodies. Color runs riot. Pinks, blues,
vermilion, orange, brown, yellow, red, saffron,
and many shades of all of them, are worn by
men and women ; even the bullock-carts, and the
horns of the bullocks themselves, are daubed
with glaring colors. Bare legs, breasts, and arms
become so soon familiar that the most scrupu-
lously pantalooned puritanism soon ceases to
notice anything unusual.

The short journey to the hotel reveals the
teeming millions, for where else could nine men
be spared to walk through the streets with a
grand-piano balanced on their heads ; reveals the
disdain of time, for where else is a trotting bul-
lock a standard of speed, except in Madeira
where the oxen draw sledges; reveals the una-
shamed duplicity, for within an hour after our
meeting Heera Tall has announced his wages per

142 THE WEST IN THE EAST

month as just twice the amount that my friend
in Lucknow has written me I ought to pay; re-
veals the supremacy of the white race, for where
else in this democratic world may the white man
walk straight, unconscious and unmenacing, and
yet find a lane made for him, as though he were
a locomotive running on a pair of rails through
a town of prairie dogs ?

An official of importance tells me that the first
thing he does on his holiday visits to England is
to walk down the Strand, that he may recover
from the place-giving, salaaming natives whom
he governs, and be jostled and elbowed back into
the equitable pedestrianism of the West. One
might infer from this that the Englishman likes
it, that the white traveller likes it. I can only
say for myself, and for the scores of English of-
ficials high and low that I met, and some of
whom I knew well, that it is not a situation
that the white man produces or wishes; rather
is it wholly and entirely what the native has
evolved as a penetrating and all-embracing legal
atmosphere. This is his notion of justice, and
order, and equality. He created it ages ago for
his own defence, and he perpetuates it to-day for
his own security. Palpable power he must
have, or there is anarchy. No one knows better
than the rich Parsi, or the intriguing Bengali, or

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 143

the peasant proprietor, or the head-men, or the
money-lenders and laborers, that the white man's
unimpeded march straight through city or vil-
lage streets is the symbol for them all, of their
life, and fire, and property insurance.

If this is modern Bombay, what must have
been the Calcutta and the Madras of one hun-
dred and fifty years ago, when Clive and Hast-
ings laid the foundation-stones of British India ?
What indeed was the England of those days, the
England of George I, who could not read Eng-
lish and "who loved nothing but punch and fat
women"; the England of George II, who "had
been a bad son, a worse father, an unfaithful
husband, and an ungraceful lover"; the Eng-
land over whose political life was the soiling
smear of Walpolean corruption; the England
whose cabinet ministers fought for the control
of the secret-service fund used for the bribery of
the members of the House of Commons; the
England which protested not a word that Fox,
as paymaster of the forces, should have a hun-
dred thousand pounds of the nation's money out
at interest for his own account, and who at one
time made a mart of his office, and paid away as
much as twenty-five thousand pounds in one
morning, in the purchase of votes to buy sup-
port for a timorous government?

144 THE WEST IN THE EAST

When one stops to think of the political con-
ditions of government in the country from which
Clive and Hastings came, and of the conditions
in the land to which they went, one is surprised
at their guiltlessness. Clive fought like an Eng-
lishman, but he bribed, deceived, and on one oc-
casion actually forged a name to a treaty, like an
Oriental. Both he and Hastings grew to look
upon the getting and keeping of wealth, in a fash-
ion that ruins men, whether in Calcutta in the
eighteenth, or in New York in the twentieth cen-
tury. Such rupees, and such dollars, can only
buy the clothing of a convict, though their wear-
ers and their descendants live in palaces.

Clive, who was bom in 1725, went out to In-
dia as a clerk in the service of the East India
Company at the age of eighteen. He was a
whole year getting from London to Madras, one
can go from London to Bombay now in fourteen
days, and the territory of the company he was
to serve consisted of a few square miles, and
even for that, rent was paid to the native govern-
ments. Here is a picture of an uncouth and
morbid young man, destined to mope in an office
chair. The French and the English go to war.
A French governor of Mauritius captures Ma-
dras. Clive joins the army, but peace is declared
and he returns to his desk. Peace in Europe did

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 145

not impose peace in India. A Frenchman of
great ability, Dupleix, by name, saw the oppor-
tunity to tie together the scattered fagots of power
left in India after the death of Aurangzeb, the
last of the Mughals, and began to do so. He
played one Indian state against another, and
backed by a small, but vastly superior force in
point of efficiency, he put, and kept in power the
native ruler or rulers he favored, and he soon
became himself the supreme influence in south-
ern India. Clive is now twenty-five. He urged
his superiors to strike a blow to save India, and
the English trading company, from complete
French supremacy. He marched to Arcot, and
took it without a blow. He was besieged there,
he was offered large bribes to surrender, held out
for fifty days, was attacked, defeated the enemy,
and marched back to Madras as the first suc-
cessful English soldier in India. There he found
Major Stringer Lawrence just arrived from Eng-
land, and his superior in command. The Law-
rences could make a frieze of their names around
India's temple of fame. This first Lawrence
won Clive's friendship, and between them in two
years they broke the power of the French in India.
The "fierce equality" of the Republic to be, of
the French Revolution, could brook no superior
men then, as now. Dupleix was stripped of his

146 THE WEST IN THE EAST

fortune and his fame, and died in obscurity; La-
bourdonnais was sent to the Bastille, and Lally
was dragged to his execution with a gag between
his lips. No wonder the French are not col-
onists !

Clive returned to England, still a boy, to be
toasted as "General" Clive, and to receive a
diamond-hilted sword from the company which
he had saved. In 1755 he sailed for India with
a commission of lieutenant-colonel, and the ap-
pointment of governor of Fort St. David at
Madras.

The province of Bengal was governed by a
native prince of eighteen, who, becoming jealous
of the growing power of the English, found an
excuse for attacking Calcutta. Most of the Eng-
lish fled down the river, but one hundred and
forty-six remained. Surajah Dowlah or Siraj-
ud-daula — his name deserves to be remembered
— ordered these prisoners to be confined in the
jaU at Fort William, a room eighteen feet square.
It was June. I know the heat of Calcutta in
March, what must it be in June .'' The na-
tives prodded these English men, women, and
children into the jail, and laughed at them and
ridiculed them as they suffocated. In the morn-
ing twenty-three were taken out alive. The one
Englishwoman who survived was sent oflf to the

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 147

harem of the young prince. This is the Black
Hole of Calcutta story.

Truly the English are a phlegmatic race. In
the year 1910, in Calcutta again, they screen
the motor-car of their viceroy, of the representa-
tive of their king, with heavy wire netting, be-
cause the descendants of the people of Surajah
Dowlah throw stones at him. It seems a slow
method of teaching self-government in India, and
somewhat expensive in the lives of men and chil-
dren, and the purity of women, but no doubt
they know best.

On hearing of this outrage, Clive and a squad-
ron under Admiral Watson sailed for Calcutta.
Calcutta was recovered with little fighting, and
much to Clive's regret the Nawab Surajah Dow-
lah consented to a peace, and made compensa-
tion to the company for their money losses —
the men, women, and children were not paid
for ! This might have been the end of the story,
but again there was war between England and
France. Clive took up the gauntlet in India.
Surajah Dowlah sided with the French. Clive
marched out to Plassey, about seventy miles
north of Calcutta, with 1,000 Europeans, 2,000
Sepoys, and 8 pieces of artillery. The Nawab's
army numbered 35,000 foot and 15,000 horse.
Clive attacked while the enemy were at dinner,

148 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and scattered the Nawab's army to the winds.
This was June 23, 1757, just a hundred years
before the Mutiny.

Clive demanded over 2,000,000 pounds ster-
ling as an indemnity, and was paid a little more
than half that sum, of which Rs. 200,000 went
to Clive as commander-in-chief, and Rs. 1,600,-
000 as a private donation. A sum equal to about
one million dollars of our money at that time.
The rupee has since declined very much in value.
At the same time the landholders' rights of the
882 square miles around Calcutta were granted
to the company. Later, the land tax was given
to Clive personally, and he thus became the land-
lord of the company he served.

Following the fashion of the day, Clive
schemed to put his own candidate, Mir Jafar,
in the place of Surajah Dowlah. While prepar-
ing to oust him, he plotted against him and used,
amongst others, a wily Hindu named Omichund.
The Hindu, knowing the secrets of the plot,
threatened to inform Surajah Dowlah, unless he
were promised a bribe of three hundred thou-
sand pounds. He further demanded that this
payment to himself should figure in the treaty.
Clive prepared two treaties, one shown to the
Hindu blackmailer with the promise of payment
included, the other without it. Fearing that

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 149

Admiral Watson would disapprove, he forged
Watson's name to the treaty. When all was
over, the Hindu was informed that he had been
out-Orientalized by Clive, and later went mad.

Mir Jafar began to fear the very power that
upheld him, and secretly intrigued with a Dutch
force which arrived from Java. Clive routed
these. Their ships were destroyed, their troops
scattered, and three months later Clive sailed for
England. He was a great man now, and be it
said he had great expectations of the honors to
be awarded him at home. Who has not been
disappointed in such expectations ? Clive was.
He was a rich man now. He had sent home
more than two hundred and fifty thousand
pounds, and he had besides the spendid income
from the land rents given him by the grateful
Indian prince he had supported. Praise has a
parasite, one steady and constant companion,
malice. Clive was attacked in Parliament, and
he was attacked even by the shareholders of the
East India Company.

Five years after leaving India for the second
time, he was besought, even by those who had
attacked him, to go back to save India again, to
save her from the bribe-taking and personal ped-
dling of the company's own servants. Stories
of repeated revolutions, of a disorganized, pillag-

150 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ing, and corrupt administration reached Lon-
don. Clive alone could save the situation.

He was made governor and commander-in-
chief of the British possessions in Bengal, and
as Baron Clive of Plassey in the peerage of Ire-
land, he arrived in Calcutta in May, 1765, and
remained a year and a half. He had now to
fight the corruption, both military and civilian,
of his own people. Even British officers threat-
ened to resign if they were not allowed to steal.
He forbade the receiving of gifts from natives,
he prohibited private trade, he increased the sal-
aries of the company's servants, he set the house
of India in order, declined any reward, and re-
turned to England poorer than when he left it.

These were the days of the nabob, and Clive
was pointed to as the chief nabob of all. Eng-
lishmen of little education, training, or taste,
returned from India with swiftly made fortunes.
They out-housed, out-carriaged, out-entertained,
out-spent, and outraged the feelings of their
home-keeping neighbors. Like many of the
present-day American millionaires, they rode
rough-shod mounted on Money. India in those
days was far away from England. People did
not go there for a winter's jaunt as now they
go. Officers, military and civil, did not go and
come, and send their wives and daughters home

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 151

during the hot season. Men went to India, even
the servants of the East India Company went, to
exploit India not to serve her, to bring back a
fortune as speedily as possible for themselves,
not to protect the wealth, and to increase the
wealth, and to conserve the resources of India
for the people of India.

They formed connections that were degrading,
they made themselves as comfortable as a horde
of cheap and obsequious servants could make
them, and they became a race apart, bom of
unlettered and irresponsible prosperity. When
they returned to their native land they had other
moral habits, tyrannous and irritable manners,
ways of vulgar self-assertion, and the belief that
mouthfuls of oaths and fistfuls of gold were the
proper and most eflScient weapons of civilization.
They bound books that they did not read, they
bought pictures they did not appreciate, they
housed themselves as territorial magnates, who
were but social pygmies, and substituted a gilded
self -consciousness for family tradition. It is
doubtful whether the manners and morals of the
majority of their enemies, either then or now,
oflPered security of standing, for the criticisms
passed upon either the nabob of the eighteenth
or the nabob of the twentieth century. There is
a crowd of social as of political urchins always

152 THE WEST IN THE EAST

with leisure, and always ready to join in the pur-
suit of the unfortunate and the unpopular.

" I've rings on my fingers,
I've bells on my toes,
I've elephants to ride upon
My little Irish Rose.

So come to your Nabob,"
&c. &c.

was one of the jingles of the general ridicule of
the time. When virtue, righteously indignant,
sounded the horn for the chase, malice, envy,
jealousy, and their cur-companions joined the
pack, delighted to have the opportunity to yelp,
and snarl, and snap, and bite if possible, in
such distinguished company, and under auspices
which made their jackal impudence look leonine.
One may admire the Burke of those days, or of
this, but the pack of muck-rakers which yelps
the chorus is as contemptible now as then. One
is tempted to defend the nabob merely because
the majority of his accusers and assailants are
actuated by such mean motives.

I sometimes shock my dilettante and prema-
turely effete American friends, by expressing my
hearty enjojmaent of the horde of Occidental na-
bobs from my own country, who nowadays pour
through Europe. Their naif test of what is pre-
cious by its price ; their sentimental longing and

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 153

reverence for what is old; the clothing of their
women, imitated from the only models they are
privileged to see at close quarters, the cocottes of
Paris ; their reiterated nasal narration of the his-
tory of their dollars, and their glowing enumera-
tion of those to come ; their swiftly acquired and
confidential comradeship with hotel clerks, cou-
riers, and shop-keepers; their confident views,
boldly expressed, upon subjects with the element-
ary aspects of which they are totally unfamiliar;
their chief occupations, which seem to be spend-
ing money, advertising their wives and daughters
in the newspapers, and explaining their ances-
try, in all these symptoms I rejoice. Such peo-
ple are the signal and sonorous heralds of the
power of mere money, and at the same time
ominous examples of the graces it destroys; they
are hard-featured and soft-handed; they are
cultivated by those who would prey upon them,
and shunned almost with loathing by the aris-
tocracy of simplicity, sincerity, and responsi-
bility; they are the modern barbarians of the
Rome of modem civilization; they are of those
who must define the word "gentleman" them-
selves in order to be included in the definition,
and no body of men spend so much time at the
task ; and even now against their brutal and con-
scienceless methods the state is arming itself.

154 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Every one knows the names of these leaders
of the Goths and Vandals of our time, and no
libraries, parks, colleges, hospitals, and cringing
clerical receivers of such bribes can cloak them
in the shining garments of charity; we all, alas,
are surrounded, too, by their imitators, who,
though lacking in their prowess, lack nothing of
their lust for plunder. The sad feature of the
situation is that dignity in manners, simplicity
in morals, responsibility of wealth, fearlessness in
administration, will all suffer, before a new Rome
emerges from the clutches of this blundering,
plundering, and reckless band.

Why do I, an American, rejoice at this spec-
tacle, it may be asked. The answer is simple.
The higher their banners hang on the walls of the
social or shopping citadels of London, Paris, and
New York, the more brazen their manners, the
more high-handed their methods, the swifter and
surer will come their downfall. I laugh to think
that the man of greasy complexion, of glittering
eye, of over-full belly and protruding pocket, can
believe that because London dines with him in
order to escape with some of his wealth tied up in
his daughter's trousseau, because Paris panders
to him, that therefore he is meant to strangle
the Puritan of the East, and the Cavalier of the
South, and the honest emigrant on the land

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 155

between them, of my coimtry. His trial is not
far off, and his Burke and his Sheridan are pre-
paring their suit against him, and the Western
nabob will disappear as did his Eastern proto-
type. He has been permitted to grow, from the
days of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk rascality, and
to escape thus far, through no intrepid or in-
genious defence of his own, but because those
who oppose and despise him shrink from seeming
to ally themselves with any form of socialism in
attacking him. I, for one, would rather suffer
the nabob, than to see the worthy ambitions,
energy, initiative, and the commercial aggres-
siveness and ability of my country taxed into cow-
ardice, and be-lawed into helplessness, by the
leaders of a mob of all the shiftlessness, envy,
crankiness, and inability in the land. I would
rather a few freebooters escaped, than that the
state should be bullied by a bureaucracy created
and supported by the state itself. Every man
who mulcts the treasury of a railroad, who uses
false weights for his sugar, or who rigs the stock
market, shouts "Socialism" when it is attempted
to punish him. Just the contrary is true. The
men who do most to bring the menace of social-
ism are these very financial freebooters, bar-
barians, and nabobs of the West, whose salient
characteristics I have attempted to describe. It

156 THE WEST IN THE EAST

is nonsense to proclaim that we cannot have jus-
tice without socialism and fair-dealing without
bureaucracy. One might as logically assert that
to hang a murderer, or to imprison a thief, means
a return to feudalism, or the founding of an au-
tocracy.

Wealth and power in the ordinary scheme of
things should be hard to get, but equal justice
should keep them within reach of every honest
citizen whose labors and abilities deserve them.
Inferior people always think that the work of
the writer, the painter, the soldier, the adminis-
trator, once it is done must be easy for them,
since they only accomplish what is easy them-
selves. They account for it by luck or by op-
portunity, never remembering that their own
abilities never seem to find this right oppor-
tunity. That is what luck is. It is the hard
work done by ability and opportunity when they
meet. There is only one success which is easy,
but also precarious, and that is intemperate ora-
tory fondling the mob with deceitful words.

Clive stood out as the chief of the nabobs, he
became the best-hated man in England. A com-
mittee of Parliament censured, but did not con-
demn him. He died by his own hand in 1774.

Clive went to India when India was fifteen
thousand miles away. He changed the East

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 157

India Company from a band of plundering ped-
lers, into the beginnings of a beneficent govern-
ment. He won for England the greatest de-
pendency she has ever had, or ever will have.
He realized to the Indian a white governor as
powerful and more just than any ruler in their
history. The shadow of his greatness still lends
security to every white man, woman, and child,
and likewise to every brown man, woman, and
child, in India.

He forged a friend's name, he lied to an ac-
compHce, he accepted wealth from those he con-
quered, he died by his own hand.

He is very dull, or very daring, who assumes
the right to hold the scales of justice for God,
in pronouncing a final verdict upon this man.
Few of us are so greatly good, or so contempti-
bly bad, as this man. Few of us accomplish
much, or leave a reputation worth puzzling
over.

Warren Hastings succeeded Clive as governor-
general in 1772, and for thirteen years, consoli-
dated a British administration in India, for the
vast territories which Clive had done so much to
win. He became the organizer, as Clive had
been the founder, of the British Indian Empire.
One is tempted to write on of Hastings, as the
temptation to write of Clive was irresistible.

158 THE WEST IN THE EAST

There was still rough work to do and Hastings
used rough weapons.

Authority means responsibility, responsibility
demands control, and control easily converts itself
into possession. Such was the logical progres-
sion of the English in India. They demanded
peace and fair play for themselves, and then for
those whom they protected. The sphere of in-
fluence of this trading company easily widened
to dominion. Protection for themselves or their
allies often meant war, and war to insure its eflS-
cacy meant control, and control, disputed, was
followed by possession.

This cycle of progress has reached such a pitch
that to-day the British crown has stretched its
sphere of influence not only throughout India,
but far beyond the boundaries of India. From
Singapore in the south to Afghanistan in the
north, and from Thibet in the east to Persia and
Egypt in the west, is included in the vast cloak
of territory now deemed necessary to the pro-
tection from rough political weather of that lit-
tle colony of rented acres to which Clive sailed in
1743. Take a map and look at it. The Ind-
ian Empire, or its allies and feudatories, now
occupies the whole area of southern Asia be-
tween Russia and China. On the north and
west she controls, as against a possible offensive

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 159

move from Russia, Beluchistan, Afghanistan,
Kashmir, and the petty states beyond Kashmir
up to the skirts of the Hindu Kush Mountains.
To the east and south are Nepal and Burma, and
beyond Burma a line of semi-independent chief-
tainships, which serve as buffers between India
and China. The outer frontier of British India
has an immense circumference. The south-
eastern extremity on the Gulf of Siam extends
thence to Thibet on the north, thence north and
westward to the Oxus. On the north-west it
covers Afghanistan and Beluchistan, and finally
has its western and southern extremity on the
shores of the Arabian Sea. This is what the
British Empire has undertaken to defend against
Japan, China, Russia, Persia, and Turkey,
and with Germany on her flank in the North
Sea. There can be no weakening, no social-
reform flabbiness, if these colossal territorial re-
sponsibilities are to be properly safeguarded.
There is also a discontented, some say seditious,
many say disloyal, population in India to keep
under. In Lucknow and other towns the statue
of the empress-queen is guarded day and night
by a sentinel, to protect it from coarse infamy
and injury.

The history of the settling of the boundary
stones is a long and complicated one, reaching

160 THE WEST IN THE EAST

down to that gallant soldier and patriot, and dis-
tinguished historian, Lord Roberts, who is alive
to-day.

The history of the settlement of the moral
territory was concluded once and for all when,
after Clive's impeachment, his successor, War-
ren Hastings, was also impeached, in a trial last-
ing seven years, a trial conducted for the British
crown, and for the Christian world, by Burke.
The pith of the matter at issue was, whether the
control of alien races by Christian rulers per-
mitted the use of alien methods and morals;
whether, in short, the Western ruler should be
permitted to have an easy code of geographical
ethics, one for London, and one for Calcutta;
one for Amsterdam, and one for Java; one for
Washington, and one for Cuba; one for Brussels,
and one for the Congo. Theoretically the ques-
tion was settled for all time at the trial of War-
ren Hastings in the historic hall at Westminster;
practically it is still to be enforced, but only here
and there, and by conquerors other than the
Anglo-Saxons. St. Augustine writes: "To ex-
tend rulership over subdued natives is to bad
men a felicity, but to good men a necessity."

The East preys upon the weak, the West pro-
tects the weak. The social economy of the East
is based upon the law of the jungle, we of the

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 161

West make the attempt, at least, to base our
own upon the dicta of Christ. Therein lies the
difference which separates us completely. It is
the diflFerence between the wolf and the sheep-
dog. I do not maintain that the shepherd's dog
is always, everywhere, perfectly correct in his
behavior, but his ideal and his general standard
of conduct are protection and guidance for the
sheep, and affection and loyalty for his master.
While the ideal and the general standard of the
wolf are to kill both shepherd and sheep, if it
can be done with safety to himself.

Even after the new code of the rulers was firmly
established morally, it had to fix itself physically.
The natives of India could not be taught in a
hundred years to believe what for two thousand
years and more they had been beaten and plun-
dered into not believing. The Mutiny in 1857
was the result of their scepticism. The motto
of that trading company in 1757 might well have
been: Omnes diligunt munera, but the most bit-
ter enemy of Great Britain must confess that her
civil service both in India and elsewhere is now a
standard for the world. Candor non laeditur auro.

The civil government of two hundred and
thirty-two millions and the partial control of
sixty-six millions in India are now in the hands
of about one thousand two hundred Englishmen,

162 THE WEST IN THE EAST

including military officers in civil employ and
others, and I doubt if there is one brown man's
rupee in any white man's pocket that should not
be there. But a man may be honest, contemp-
tuously; just, arrogantly; and confident, care-
lessly, that those beneath him will accept his
actions without his sympathy, and judge him by
his morals rather than by his manners. But
that is not the brown man's way. The prohibi-
tion of sati, or widow-burning; the execution of
the high-caste Brahman like any low-caste man,
if he was found guilty; the missionary assertive-
ness on behalf of themselves and their converts;
the indifference to the laws of caste; the doing
away with any legal obstacle to the remarriage
of widows ; tales that in the jails all were fed alike
without reference to caste; the fear of the Brah-
mans that they would lose their position and in-
fluence; the readjustment of land revenues and
taxes; the settlement of claims and boundaries;
the lapse of territory to the British power in de-
fault of direct or collateral heirs; the story of
the Enfield cartridges greased with a mixture of
cow's fat and lard — true as shown by the in-
vestigations of Mr. Forrest — Lecky writes that
the Sepoys in the Mutiny had "sound reason"
for fearing injury to their religion as Hindus and
Mussulmans: "This is a shameful and terrible

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 163

fact, and if mutiny were justifiable, no stronger
justification could be given than that of the Se-
poy troops"; the sickening sentimentality of the
ignorant English at home, who feted and petted
a certain Azimula Kham, the emissary of Nana
Sahib himself, a man of no position in his own
country, but who was received into the best so-
ciety in London, and who exchanged love-letters
with ladies of rank and position, even became
engaged to an English girl, and was called "her
dear Eastern son" by an idiotic old dowager;
flogging abolished in the native army, but con-
tinued among the British, the natives looking on
at the flogging of white men; the annexation of
new territories until the Rajput, the Mahratta,
the Sikh, and the Muhammadan laid aside their
common jealousies and recognized England as
equally the foe of all; no rapid intercommunica-
tion as now ; a British force in India of thirty-six
thousand men as over against a native force of
two hundred and fifty-seven thousand, besides
the armed police, and lascars attached to the
artillery as fighting men — it would have been
a miracle if there had been no mutiny.

Along different lines much the same thing
goes on in England to-day, and again it will be
a miracle if there is no trouble with Germany,
or in India, within ten years. One can depend

164 THE WEST IN THE EAST

upon the British, however, to wait for that event
until they are fully unprepared.

If an imaginative observer were asked to. coin
a phrase least adapted to the present situation
and condition of the British Empire, he might
use the words: "Englishmen may sleep peace-
fully in their beds ! " It is comical to record that
the young solicitor who answers to the country
for the navy uses this phrase; the able metaphy-
sician who responds for the army uses this phrase ;
the lately anarchical labor leader, who replies for
the commerce of the country, uses this phrase;
the solicitor who is responsible for the finances
of the country uses this phrase ; the Prime Min-
ister, a scholarly barrister, and be it said the
steady-headed, strong-handed master of them
all, despite the tales to the contrary, repeats the
same phrase. I repeat, for an almost wearisome
number of times, they are a great people! Fancy
singing "Rock-a-by, baby, on the tree-top" to
the House of Commons and to the country, with
such responsibilities, such perils, such warnings
pressing upon their attention. We may all envy
them their sound nerves. If this cabinet were
a drinking cabinet, I should ask, as did Lincoln
of the accusers of Grant, for the brand they most
aflfect. I should indulge myself, and distribute
what could be spared in Wall Street.

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 165

The British were warned over and over again
before 1857. Read that rare but valuable book,
"Essays Military and Political," by Sir Henry
Montgomery Lawrence, and see the blundering
methods, described by one of their own most du-
tiful servant sons, which brought on the Mutiny.

The native, instead of understanding, mis-
understood. He did not see that these changes
were meant for his good. He believed that the
Brahman was a law unto himself, that widows
should be burned, and certainly not be allowed
to remarry, and thus stiffen the competition, al-
ready severe, against his own daughters. The
annexation and control of territory was robbery
to him; he did not see that it meant peace, se-
curity, and justice. That the Hindus' cartridges
were to be greased with the fat of the sacred cow,
and the Muhammadans' cartridges greased with
the fat of the abhorred pig, was to them what
coarse jests at the miracle of the Mass would be
to Catholics. It was blasphemous, terrible, and
ominous of mysterious and awful spiritual pun-
ishment.

We rejoice at the daring of Luther and Sir
Thomas More, and the blood and fire of our
own religious revolution, why then be aston-
ished that there was revolution in India before
the protestant there won freedom of opinion and

166 THE WEST IN THE EAST

worship ? The jaunty confidence, or the prayer-
ful faith, in right doing of the white man, was
not accepted as the voice of any god known to
them by the Indians. The Indian brain seethed
with mutinous misunderstanding, and why not!
The Enghsh were so obtuse that they saw not,
neither did they hear, much less did they take
any precautions. Many of the most energetic
and valuable officers had been drafted off from
their regiments, both to serve in the Crimea, and
to meet the heavy demands of the many newly
acquired territories for governors and advisers.
I quote the words of one of the heroes, and the
historian of that time, the words of the man who
has retrieved more than one of England's maud-
lin blunders, the man who is to-day emphasizing
with his now unequalled experience of the past,
the dangers of the present and the future. Lord
Roberts. "Seniority had produced brigadiers
of seventy, colonels of sixty, captains of fifty.
Nearly every military officer who held a com-
mand or high position on the staff in Bengal when
the Mutiny broke out disappeared within the
first few weeks. Some were killed, some died of
disease, but the great majority failed completely
to fulfil the duties of the positions they held.
Two generals of division were removed, seven
brigadiers were found wanting, and out of the

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 167

seventy-three regiments of regular cavalry and
infantry which mutinied only four commanding
oflBcers were given other commands, younger
officers being selected to raise and command the
new regiments."

These were the gentlemen who, in pajamas,
with a whiskey-peg and a cigar, seated on the
roof of a bungalow, drilled the natives of India,
believing that the gods, and literature, and re-
ligion, and customs of three hundred million
people for two or three thousand years would
melt into acquiesence at the wave of the whiskey
or cigar-laden hand from on high.

They were dealing with a generation which had
forgotten the anarchy and bloodshed, the pillag-
ing and oppression, which preceded British rule.
Muhammadans looked back to the time when
they were emperors of India, and when British
ambassadors stood meekly on the lower steps of
their emperor's throne. The Hindus only re-
membered that they were on the point of wrest-
ing the control from the Muhammadans when
the white man stepped in. The interim of order,
security, and justice was forgotten. Instead of to
a magnificently clad figure seated on a bejewelled
throne, with a peacock's tail of precious stones
worth millions as a background for his turban,
and this in the setting of a marble hall which

168 THE WEST IN THE EAST

still remains as a monument of beauty, instead
of to this he salaamed to an amorphous and rubi-
cund figure on the roof of a cheaply built bunga-
low, whose sceptre was a cigar, and whose spir-
itual life was contained in a glass. The one was
thinking of curry and comfort; the other of tra-
ditions, and faith, and lost prestige; and the
gentlemen of curry and comfort were actually
dumfounded when the underfed underlings be-
trayed them, killed their women and children,
and marched from Meerut to Delhi, before they
could get the whiskey-fed rheum out of their
eyes. Indeed they let a whole night and day go
by, did these men, whose ancestors had driven
Clive to suicide, before they made a move. How
different if Clive had been there!

The Mutiny opened May the 10th, 1857, and
it was January, 1859, before the English gained
complete control again. And at what a price
of heroism and suffering ! But, not the Mutiny
nor any other disturbance, political or otherwise,
in India, affects more than a minute proportion
of India. Throughout the Mutiny the peasants
tended their fields ; the rice, the wheat, the sugar,
the cotton were sown and reaped as usual. Mill-
ions in India did not even hear of the Mutiny.
This is a characteristic of India to be empha-
sized and to be remembered. No other country

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 169

is so mute, so unconscious, so deaf in the midst
of turmoil and bloodshed. The American must
school his imagination to this situation. A fire
in Chicago, a flood in Texas, an earthquake in
California is a fire, a flood, an earthquake for
the whole country. Not so in India. There were
people peacefully at work within fifty miles of the
fighting who knew nothing of it; and even now,
flood, plague, or famine slays hundreds of thou-
sands in one part of India, and the rest of India
is ignorant and undisturbed. When one hears
of unrest in India, or when one hears that India
wants this, or needs that, all such statements
must be put into this enormous crucible where
they are ground exceeding small, and prove to
be after all only the unrest, the need, or the want
of a minute fraction of the unwieldy whole. It
is like one of the huge zoological reconstructions
of another age, whose hide is so thick, whose ex-
tremities are so far apart, that unlike any other
bodies known to us, what touches or hurts or
heals one part has no effect upon the others.

At Cawnpur was a large native garrison, and
when they mutinied Nana Sahib put himself at
their head. The Europeans, including more
women and children than fighting men, were be-
sieged for two weeks, and then trusting to a safe-
conduct from Nana Sahib, they surrendered.

170 THE WEST IN THE EAST

They embarked in boats on the Ganges, the
boats were set fire to and shot at by the natives
from both banks, and only four escaped. The
women and children were massacred a few days
later, some of them being pitchforked living
upon the bayonets of their murderers.

Delhi was besieged for months from the sur-
rounding ridge, over which I have walked and
driven, but it was only in September that the
Kashmir Gate was blown in, and Nicholson fell
at the head of the storming party.

The chief commissioner of Oudh was a Law-
rence, and not a Lawrence for nothing. He pre-
pared for a siege in the Residency at Lucknow,
and was mortally wounded there, but his intelli-
gent prevision saved his companions till at last
Lucknow was relieved.

It is one of the ghastly nightmares of history
to see that Black Hole of Calcutta, that well at
Cawnpur, that cellar in the residency at Luck-
now, that grave-dotted ridge at Delhi. Women
and children outraged, suffocated, pitchforked
on bayonets, burnt, stabbed, starved, and stran-
gled : it is a horrible tale. Say what one will of
all that, it is British business, British vengeance,
not ours, but it is a disgrace to the whole white
race that British callousness, and lack of taste
and reverence, should permit these graves to be

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 171

overgrown with weeds, should suffer that miser-
able little graveyard on the ridge above Delhi,
should allow the lettering on the Kashmir Gate
to become defaced. The only monument in all
India that is not a travesty is the statue of John
Nicholson, and more than one of the statues of
the white empress and the white emperor of
India are black! With all their splendid quali-
ties and achievements, to which I have tried
without prejudice to do justice, their stupid-
ity is at times as criminal as their attempts at
artistic commemoration are grotesque. If taste
is not indigenous, we can and do supply them
with a West, a Whistler, a Sargent, a La Farge,
a St. Gaudens. Let them knight their painters
of marble baths, and Greek maidens, and bridge
problems, and over-decorated wooden sover-
eigns, and sentimental scenes of bourgeois do-
mesticity, but let them turn over their monu-
ments, in which we are all interested, to the real
craftsmen of the arts.

The East India Company, its first charter
signed and sealed in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth,
came to an end in 1858 after the Mutiny. The
administration of India was handed over to the
crown. Queen Victoria, later, on January 1 , 1 877,
to be proclaimed empress of India, issued the fol-
lowing proclamation when India was taken over :

172 THE WEST IN THE EAST

"We hold ourselves bound to the natives of
our Indian territories by the same obligations of
duty which bind us to all our subjects ; and these
obligations, by the blessings of Almighty God,
we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil.
And it is our further will, that so far as may be,
our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be fully
and impartially admitted to offices in our ser-
vice, the duties of which they may be qualified,
by their education, ability, and integrity, duly
to discharge."

I quote these words for my readers because
they were quoted many times to me by the dis-
contented natives of India. The British went
further with words of promise than they find it
easy to go in actual practice. Intentions have
lungs, breathe, and are communicative. The
English are forever intending things for India,
which when they are done are already ungrate-
fully received as things long ago deserved; and
when they are not done, and compromise is sub-
stituted, the Indian sees nothing but hypocrisy
and broken promises.

A distinguished Indian gentleman, writing of
the reforms just introduced by Lord Minto, says:
"Why is there so little enthusiasm among the
educated classes about them ? Why are some
even beginning to fear that they may fail to heal

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 173

the existing distemper? Because a certain fa-
tality seems to clog the steps of the government,
that whenever it does anything useful for the
people it knows not how to do it with good grace."
The italics are mine, for there in a nutshell is the
ever-present criticism of British rule. It is just,
honest, but unsympathetic and ungracious. It
is a delicate and a difficult problem. One must
tread softly both physically and metaphorically.
We ourselves have not won such laurels by our
dealings with the ten million negroes in America
that we can afford to be censorious, or to offer
easy, ready-made solutions for the problem. In-
effable cocksureness might be tempted to shout:
Get on or get out! were it not for the possibility
of a despatch the next morning announcing a
lynching-bee in one's own country, to emphasize
one's fallibility.

If you and I had taken over the government
of a distracted country, which for centuries had
dated passing events from the last raid, the last
massacre, the last famine, the last deluge, the
last plundering ride of a foreign invader; and if
we had laid there 30,000 miles of railway, 100,000
miles and more of telegraph wire ; if we had wa-
tered 17,000,000 acres with canals of our own
construction; if we had arranged that one in
every seven acres of the whole country were ir-

174 THE WEST IN THE EAST

rigated; if we had built schools, nursing homes,
dispensaries, hospitals, where 8,000,000 chil-
dren are vaccinated and 25,000,000 people re-
ceive relief annually, and post-offices and police-
stations ; if school attendance had increased from
500,000 to 6,000,000; if the letters carried had
increased from none to 700,000,000 annually;
if we had policed the country from end to end,
administered justice without fear or favor; spent
millions of money and thousands of lives in the
country's defence; protected the people from
brutal customs, protected the widow and the
orphan; secured to every man, woman, and child
his rights, his property, and his earnings; if out
of nearly 29,000 offices of the government draw-
ing salaries ranging from ,£60 — no small in-
come for a native of India — up to £5,000, as
many as 22,000 were ffiled by natives, and only
6,500 by Europeans; if out of a gross revenue
of £75,272,000 only £20,816,000 was raised by
taxes so-called, while in England taxation sup-
plies five-sixths, and in India only about one-
fourth, of the public income; if we had reduced
crime to proportions smaller than in England
itself; if the public debt, outside of debt secured
by the ample asset of the railways, canals, and
so on, amounted to only £28,000,000, a sum less
than half of what it cost to suppress the Mutiny

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 175

alone; if the land, which when we took charge had
hardly any commercial value, was now worth
£300,000,000; if the export and import trade in
less than fifty years had increased from £40,-
000,000 to £200,000,000, while taxation works
out at about 37 cents per head; if innocent re-
ligious and social customs had not only not been
changed, but protected from interference, in
these days too, alas, when so many people mis-
take interference for influence, and in a land of
jarring and quarrelsome sects — if you and I
had a fraction of these things accomplished by
the English in India to our credit, we should be
astonished at censure from without, or criticism
from within. We might indeed be tempted to
resent them.

The Indian agitators tell the people that the
railways carry the grain away from the starving,
and pay large dividends to the builders ; that the
canals carry pestilence and disease; that the
taxes go to the support of an army to fight Eng-
land's battles, and to the support of officials who
bully the native; that the schools, and hospitals,
and colleges are hot-beds of heresy, where the
young Indian is taught to deny his ancestral be-
liefs, that the foreign ruler may surreptitiously
introduce his own creed and ritual. These are
the grosser forms of seditious talks and litera-

176 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ture intended to impress the agricultural class.
The more intelligent are fed with more subtle
accusations.

One accusation against the English carries
weight. There are people still living who can
remember when India had its weavers and dyers
by the hundreds of thousands, and when weav-
ing was a profitable industry. In the early
years of the last century, it was stated in evi-
dence, that the cotton and silk goods of India
could be sold in England at a profit of from fifty
to sixty per cent, and there and then the English
weaver was protected by duties upon this class
of Indian goods of from seventy to eighty per
cent on their value. The poor Indian weaver,
earning his six or eight cents a day, was ruined
for the benefit of the English manufacturer.
Lancashire mills are protected to this day by
duties on Indian goods. This is indefensible and
contemptible. British goods are forced upon
India without duty, while Indian weavers were
starved out by heavy duties. England bids In-
dia supply her with raw materials, that she may
employ her capital and her labor profitably, and
then sell the manufactured articles to helpless
India, deprived of the right to manufacture for
herself. I emphasize this, because I consider
it a justifiable and competent criticism against

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 177

British rule. We must all agree, Americans,
French, Germans, that we should go to war in
an instant against such unfair oppression.

On the other hand, the accusation of lack of
sympathy, of comradeship, of social intercourse,
is twaddle. The Indian climate, and population,
and steady adherence to religious and social cus-
toms have swallowed up every religion and every
civilization which has mixed with it, from Buddh-
ism in religion to the Mughal dynasty. The
British maintain control, and can only retain
control, by refusing any intimacy of intercourse
which would entail the mixing of one civiliza-
tion with the other. They have their own clubs,
their own sports, their sheltered homes, and their
own codes. They go out to India in relays, and
not to settle, and that is their salvation. They
go out alone or with their families, not to mingle
and to mix, but to work at governing, and to
come home when their task is done as much
Englishmen as when they went out. If they
went to India with their families to be swallowed
up, to be incorporated socially, morally, and po-
litically, then indeed there would be no excuse for
their rule there. Any other policy would be fatal.

No race except the English could maintain
their gravity at the thought that purdah parties
are a political necessity. Most of the Indian

178 THE WEST IN THE EAST

women live secluded, and always in public cover
their faces, which is termed being in purdah.
The women of the families of the English oflS-
cials have been urged to show their interest by
inviting these ladies to their houses. They play
children's games with them, eat cakes and drink
tea with them, and stroking the dome of St.
Paul's Cathedral to influence the dean and chap-
ter is no more futile than is this silly soliciting
of comradeship with the women of India, as a
method of propitiating the irreconcilables.

Mr. Saint Nihal Singh writes: "Statistics show
the number of female children married under
four years of age to be more than 200,000, of
those married between five and nine to be over
2,000,000, and those married under fourteen to
be 8,000,000; and the enforced widowhood of
these girls is the greatest curse of India. But
while educated native men are working for the
emancipation of the women, unfortunately, as
already observed, they are persistently hindered
in their efforts by the opposition offered to their
programme of progress by their unlettered, re-
actionary womenfolk; their wives, mothers, sis-
ters, and daughters, even their widowed female
relatives, are bitterly opposed to this radical re-
form, and their combined power perpetuates the
practice.

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 179

" The last census showed that 997 Muhamma-
dan and 995 Hindu women per 1,000 were illit-
erate in the year of our Lord 1900. What is
still worse is the fact that at present less than one
per cent of Indian girls of school-going age are
being educated."

None but a great nation impervious to ridi-
cule could persist in urging officially its civil
servants to ask their wives to entertain the native
women with childish games, as a mark of a sym-
pathetic administration. The French or the
Americans would suffocate with laughter at the
suggestion. This is not sympathy, this is cur-
dled kindliness. Just as one ceases to be well
dressed when one is noticeably well dressed, so
friendliness ceases to be friendliness when it puts
on a uniform and advertises itself. But what
can you expect from a nation whose minister
for war sends out a solemn circular suggesting
that the new territorial force should assemble
on a convenient Sunday to thank God that they
had been evolved from his brain, and that their
predecessors had ceased to exist; or the even more
grotesque circular, which must certainly have
been suggested to Mr. Haldane by a wag in the
war office, but which was nonetheless sent out,
to the effect that landlords who are heads of
territorial contingents in their neighborhood

180 THE WEST IN THE EAST

should be granted permission to add an un-
sheathed sword pointing upward to their flag, or
pointing downward when they were no longer
in office ? Only a ponderous patriot could thus
offer himself for the altar of the Abraham of ridi-
cule, on the off chance that a convenient ram
would be found in the near-by bushes.

But along the lines of humor and sestheticism
a nation that will tamely submit to the Albert
Memorial monument or to the statue of Shelley
at Oxford, may be expected to furnish ample
matter for amusement. Heine wrote to a rich
uncle that there were so many fools in the world
that he felt no fear of not being able to make a
living. He even added, that he thought he could
live on that one uncle alone. The Albert Me-
morial alone would furnish a literary living for
a life-time.

The male Indian, both Hindu and Muham-
madan, of course with exceptions among the ed-
ucated, still looks upon women much as Eras-
mus did: "Woman is an absurd and ridiculous
animal, but entertaining and pleasant."

When the Englishman becomes self-conscious,
either socially or morally, he is deplorably awk-
ward. There is so much talk, so much audible
discontent, so much putting of the old methods
of government into the crucible, just now in

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 181

India, that the Englishmen is beginning to won-
der if he is right, if he is justified, and this makes
for self-consciousness and for lack of confidence,
and reacts upon the people. A nervous rider
makes a nervous horse. The Indian does not
understand that this is the vacillation of con-
science; he interprets it in the one way his ex-
perience permits him to interpret it, as fear.
Artificial sympathy, pumped-up cordiality, as-
sumed comradeship, are no more possible to the
average Englishman than trimming hats, curling
hair, or dancing skirt-dances.

There is an ample supply of honest comrade-
ship and real sympathy between the British and
the Indian. I have spent weeks camping and
travelling with soldier and civil service officials.
Any man who believes that there is lack of sym-
pathy should spend some time with British offi-
cers and their native troops ; with British officers
and the Imperial Service troops of the native
princes; with commissioners and deputy com-
missioners doing their work in the outlying dis-
tricts; or hear for the first time the Englishman
"talking shop" as the British officer in India will
do in his enthusiasm about his Gurkhas, or his
Sikhs, or his Patiala Lancers, or his Bhopal light
cavalry. It would be affectation on my part to
say that my experience is limited in these matters.

182 THE WEST IN THE EAST

for I have ridden with our Western troopers many
a mile on the plains, and only lately I have seen
Japanese cavalry schools, Chinese mountain bat-
teries, Argentine cavalry, English soldiering at
home, and nowhere in the world, I maintain, will
you find better feeling between officers and men
than in India. This is the sympathy that one
need not be ashamed of, and which counts ; while
the tea-cake variety is merely the doctrinaire
philanthropy of parochial officialdom.

When one reads a leaflet recently distributed
in Bengal signed "Editor," and with the follow-
ing postscript: "The editor will be extremely
obliged to readers if they will translate into all
languages and circulate broadcast," and which
runs as follows: "Sacrifice white blood undiluted
and pure at the call of your god on the altar of
freedom. The bones of the martyrs cry out for
vengeance, and you will be traitors to your coun-
try if you do not adequately respond to the call.
Whites, be they men, women, or children —
murder them indiscriminately, and you will not
commit any sin;" when one reads this, rubbish
though it bcj and remembers the ignorance and
prejudice of those who read it and those to
whom it is read, the sheltered humanitarianism
of the India Office seems very afternoon-teay
indeed. "His heart swelled," writes Balzac,

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 183

"with that dull collected love which we must call
humanitarianism, the eldest son of deceased phi-
lanthropy, and which is to the divine charity
what system is to art, or reasoning to deed."

Sympathy is the catch-word in India just now.
One hears it suggested on every hand as the
remedy for unrest. The kindly feeling for, and
the understanding of, another's temperament,
which makes for sympathy, curdles when it is
forced. I remember a Sunday-school of my boy-
hood days, where a class of small boys sat in a
circle around their teacher. The superintendent
was leading in prayer. One of the small boys
was gazing about the room. I even remember
that boy's name: Crosby. His teacher saw his
inattention and whispered to him fiercely : " Cros-
by, now you pray!" Through many years that
scene has been a picture to me of the folly of at-
tempting to enforce spiritual laws. The present
situation is not less ridiculous. India kept in
hand by a small party, mostly of young men in
the army and the civil service; sport-loving,
wholesome, unaffected, with no thought, most
of them, of artifice in their manners or their
methods, in very many cases adored by their
men, and of a sudden one hears the voice of
inexperience, of theoretical enthusiasm, saying:
"Now, you fellows, sympathize!" and they prob-

184 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ably sympathize the way Crosby prayed, and
they would be fools indeed if they did anything
else.

There is no cleaner, healthier, better-managed
colony in the world than Java, and we do not
consider the Dutch to be either imaginative or
sympathetic. A man may be fond of children,
and not care to take his meals with them in the
nursery, or to give them the run of his study, or
take them to lunch at his club, or to have them
camp every night in his bedroom.

Sir Richard Burton, who knew the ins and
outs of the Oriental mind if anybody ever did,
does not hesitate to say that the natives of India
cannot even respect a European who mixes with
them.

The old wholesome theory that the inferior
should be urged to play up, and be rewarded if
he did, made us Americans and English what
we are; the modern theory, born of the miasma
of the French Revolution, urging the superior
to play down, will emasculate us inevitably.

I fail to see any signs, at home or abroad, that
the coy but nonetheless calculating professional
philanthropy of the day has brought about, or is
on the way to do so, a better feeling between men.
We are producing artificial relations between men
in a hot-house, and when they are bedded out

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 185

to grow, in the competition and strife and tur-
moil of all weathers and temperatures with which
life assails them, they wilt even more quickly
than before they were so carefully tended. If
you feel your pulse, or watch your breathing,
or ponder overmuch about your digestion, your
pulse and your breathing become irregular, and
your digestion goes wrong. Try it and see. Cer-
tain human functions are, and must be, auto-
matic; they are so sensitive that the least inter-
ference with them, even thinking about them,
will disarrange them. Certain of the relations
between men, whether in India or in the negro
belt in America, or in the squalid quarters of the
poor in New York or in London, are of that kind.
If I may be permitted to use a personal illustra-
tion, I cite my own liking for the negro. I come
from his country, my family has for many scores
of years dealt with him and served him, as he
has served them. I could no more pump up
this feeling of understanding and sympathy, and
ability to get on with him, than I could think my-
self into being a painter, or urge or excite myself
into being six feet and four inches high. It may
be asked, then, if the writer is utterly contempt-
uous of kindly human feeling. No one less so.
It is the attempt to solve the inevitable problems
of economic and governmental conditions that

186 THE WEST IN THE EAST

are necessarily artificial, by an assumption of
artificial temperament and manners, that is con-
demned. \

Civilization in India, and in every great com-
mercial and political centre of the world to-day,
is distorted by the political and economic exi-
gencies of great aggregations of population, fed,
clothed, and housed by machinery instead of by
the individual labor of each one. If all the ma-
chinery in the world to-day in the cotton, corn,
and wheat fields, in the mines, in the great manu-
factories, in the transportation agencies, in all
the branches which feed, clothe, house, water,
and carry us, were suddenly to become useless,
and could not be repaired ; if our own railroads
were to be hampered by excitable legislation — if,
in short, with our present aggregations of popu-
lation we were obliged to revert to the methods
of even one hundred years ago, what awful
plague, famine, and death would follow! This
means that vast populations are existing to-day
by the grace of machinery, and not by virtue of
their own prowess, and practically every social
problem of the day arises from that and nothing
else. We are all, more or less, living upon char-
ity, except the farmer, and not by the exertion
of our natural and elementary forces ; and it is
only the strong-willed and the stout-hearted who

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 187

do not deteriorate in consequence. Those who
see this may be forgiven for not only beUev-
ing, but knowing, that more philanthropy, that
more artificial sympathy, only make matters
worse.

Modern ingenuity and obedience to the laws
of hygiene, have brought this enormous brood
into the world, and we now propose to smile and
smooth it into contentment. One might as well
attempt to bring up one's children on the sugar-
coating of one's wedding cake.

It is stated that the average length of human
life in European countries, in the sixteenth cen-
tury, was between eighteen and twenty years.
To-day it is between forty and fifty years. The
death-rate has fallen as man's life has lengthened.
In the seventeenth century the mortality rate of
London was 50 per 1,000 of population; to-day
it is 15 per 1,000 of population. In the year
1700 the mortality rate of Boston was 34 per
1,000; to-day it is 19. Within a century,
London, Berlin, and Munich have cut their
death-rates nearly in half. In Sweden, the
home of school gymnastics and government-
controlled hygiene, the average length of life
is 50 years for men, and 53 years for women,
the highest in the world. In the United States,
the average lifetime is 44 for men, and 46 for

188 THE WEST IN THE EAST

women. In India the average lifetime for men
is 23, and for women 24. It is almost impossible
to calculate the enormous increase of population
that these figures suggest; and an increase of the
number of men and women in the world of ma-
ture years, whose demands upon life for food,
for occupation, for education, for amusement,
and for governing are the demands of grown-up
people. This single problem of the increase of
the grown-up population of the world in the last
two hundred years is never mentioned; and yet
it is outstanding, ever growing, all-else-includ-
ing, and as much more overshadowing all other
problems of civilization as the sky compared to
tents. To imagine that this greatest problem of
our time, perhaps of any time, is to be solved by
doles of money, smiles, and words, is not only
ridiculous as theory, but is proving itself deplor-
able as practice. Wherever else the way out of
the tangle lies, it is not there. To issue orders
for purdah parties, and for bows and smiles on
railway trains, makes one doubt the lucid writ-
ing, the clear thinking, the masterly grasp of great
problems, for which I for one have admired and
extolled John Morley for nearly a quarter of a
century. It is not only no solution of the prob-
lem in itself, but it is tempting the unthinking
and superficial to believe that the problem is

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 189

only as difficult as the suggestion of such sickly
remedies implies.

India has a negligible amount of machinery,
and an overwhelming population, consequently
the problem is more acute there than elsewhere ;
but it exists in Germany and in Japan, and while
it is called "Unrest" in India, it is called the
"German Peril" in Europe, the "Japanese
Peril" in America. In addition to this machine-
made population, there has grown with advanc-
ing civilization and its wealth, a fashion of re-
lieving women of all share in productive labor.
America and England, for example, carry, in-
dustrially speaking, an enormous weight of idle
women, the most idle and luxurious of whom do
not even bear children, and who are the direct
incentive to extravagance and waste. Fortu-
nately they are comparatively few in number, but
they are nevertheless a factor in the problem.
Let us be frank, therefore, and say at once that
"Unrest" in India is not an exotic among social
and economic problems, it is a phase, an Ori-
ental phase, if you please, which presses upon
every country in the world, less in the United
States and in South America than elsewhere
merely because we have the food supply of the
world in our hands.

Manufactured sympathy will solve the prob-

190 THE WEST IN THE EAST

lem neither in India nor anywhere else. On
the contrary the unthinking philanthropist,
and the cunning politician, not only in India,
but in England, Germany, France, and Amer-
ica, are leading whole populations to believe
that the millions concentrated in a few hands
are the cause of the poverty and discomfort
of all the rest. There never was a meaner
nor a more dangerous lie: first, because it
tickles the fancy of the people, second, be-
cause it leads them in a wrong direction for the
solution of their troubles, and third, because it
is these very aggregations of capital that alone
make it possible even to feed these masses of pop-
ulation. Like every other remedy for human ills,
if it be easy and pleasant you may be sure it is
poisonous. There are room, and food, and leis-
ure, and opportunity for every honest, sober, hard-
working man in the world, still, whatever the
future have in store for the rapidly increasing
population of the world ; but the mill of competi-
tion is growing more and more terrible as modern
science fosters the growth of population, and the
shiftless, the dissipated, and the weak find it
harder and harder to keep on the road, and out of
the gutter, as the road becomes more and more
crowded. "Neither circumcision nor uncircum-
cision availeth anything, but a new man!" The

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 191

ghastly gospel which preaches that all our woes
are due to somebody else, and the demagogic
apostles of that gospel, will, and can, only land
their followers in a deeper ditch. Sympathy,
yes, but easy lies, never. The slightest move in
this direction, the faintest whisper to these three
hundred millions in India, would be on a par,
for fiendish cruelty, with persuading the chil-
dren of a family that all their woes were due to
the selfishness of their parents.

V

RELIGION AND CASTE IN INDIA

IN writing a chapter on religion and caste in
India, as I have seen it, I wish to begin by
proclaiming how superficial this sketch must
be, and how well I know what I do not know of
a subject to which many volumes have been de-
voted by students of many years' residence in In-
dia, and for a full analysis and history of which
many volumes are still needed.

I am proposing merely to furnish enough mate-
rial to put the situation before my countrymen,
and to show how ludicrous is the ideal of self-
government, as we understand it, for a people
so unhomogeneousj'and how calamitous will be
the result of going too fast in granting legislative
privileges.

First of all, caste is a question of birth, and
there is no entry except by birth. A worker in
a coal-mine may become a part owner thereof,
and his daughter marry a peer, and his grand-
son become a peer in England. I can personally
introduce the reader to dozens of still unedu-

193

RELIGION AND CASTE 193

cated clerks, stenographers, mill-hands, newsboys,
and their wives, widows, sisters, and daughters,
whose millions seat them at the dinner-tables of
the Brahman class in America and in England.
But no millions will enable a low-caste Hindu
to marry into a Brahman family, or even to
touch the hand, or throw his shadow on the
food, of a Brahman in India.

If a man is excommunicated by his caste fel-
lows in India, no one of the caste will eat with
him, accept water from his hands, or marry him.
His own wife will not touch him or speak with
him. He is dead to his family. The barber
even will not shave him, or cut his hair or his
toe-nails.

There is no legislation, no police work, no
trial in the courts, no adjustment of land rev-
enue or land tenure, no meeting of municipal or
district councils, no appointment to office small
or great, no handling of any community in time
of plague or famine, no hygienic precautions or
sanitary arrangements, into which does not enter
this question of caste to complicate, to make diffi-
cult, and perhaps to foil, the most reasonable and
necessary work of the administrator. A Brah-
man clerk has been known to distribute legal
documents by throwing them down at the end
of the village street in which live his low-caste

194 THE WEST IN THE EAST

brethren. Letter-carriers have been known to
refuse to enter the houses of, or to permit them-
selves to come into personal contact with, those
of a lower status than themselves.

If one could picture to oneself social snobbery
lifted into a fanatical religious faith, it would
be a pale description of the iron subdivisions of
caste in India, but even then simple as compared
with the incomprehensible intricacies of this so-
cial pall. There is no patriotism, and can be
none, in a country thus divided against itself,
and divided against itself not geographically but
socially.

As I watch for hours at a time the worshippers
at the Ghats, on the banks of the Ganges at
Benares, I only find myself more puzzled. It is
more than complicated, it is cloudy confusion,
wherein one loses the support even of one's or-
dinary mental and physical working powers.

Benares has been the capital of the Hindu re-
ligion for more years than any historian has
counted. Buddha, who was bom about 557 and
who died about 478 B. C, began his public teach-
ing in the deer-forest near what was even then
the great city of Benares. For nearly two thou-
sand five hundred years, of which we have some
knowledge, and for how many years more no man
knows, the Hindus have bathed and prayed here

RELIGION AND CASTE 195

on the banks of the Ganges. Buddhism and
Islamism have been absorbed or swept aside.

It must be said of Buddhism, however, that
it has left one indelible mark all over India,
China, and the East, and that is the teaching of
gentleness and kindness to one another and to
animals. Buddha taught that life is but a pro-
longed endeavor to escape from suffering, and
that, therefore, to cause others to suffer is the un-
forgivable sin. By meditation a man is to lose
the sense of the painfulness of life, and to earn
some mitigation from the cycle through which
he must pass before reaching Nirvana, where all
re-birth ends at last, and one loses consciousness
forever. This creed is pure agnosticism, holding
that a man's own acts alone make up the tale of
his faith.

Agnosticism everywhere throws a man back
upon himself, and everywhere and always pro-
duces one of two results. It makes men, as in
India and China, pessimists, hopeless, helpless,
and without ambitions for either their souls or
their bodies ; or it makes men colossal egoists who
worship themselves. Nothing can be more por-
tentous of evil to the race than our agnostic de-
mocracies of the West, which are putting man on
a pedestal, and waving the incense of eight hours'
work, old-age pensions, no conscription, a vote

196 THE WEST IN THE EAST

for each adult, state support, and so on, before
him.

It was a moving spectacle, for example, to all
students of the ethnic religions when Mr. Keir
Hardie, as the exponent of Western agnosticism,
or man as his own god, came out to India to
preach this doctrine to the Buddhist-impreg-
nated Indians, steeped in pessimism. They im-
mediately dubbed him the "King of the Cool-
ies" and could not wrench their imaginations to
see how a man of no caste could be worth imi-
tating or following. The first flash of a picture
of that which will some day be a terrible conflict
between the Yellow and the White was revealed
when the man who cared everything for man
met the men who care nothing for man, and
neither understood the other in the least.

Buddhism has done for the East what ration-
alism has done for the West; it makes men doubt
the existence, even deny the existence, of any
power higher than themselves, but with the abys-
mal difiference that it prostrates man in the East
while it puts him on a dangerous pinnacle in the
West. Man with nothing higher than himself
to obey, to fear, to love, or to placate, becomes
morally and mentally disorderly. The same is
true of the state, which brings itself to the con-
dition where the voting man is paranaount, and

RELIGION AND CASTE 197

to be feared, obeyed, and placated. With no
higher ideal than that, a state disintegrates, drifts
into bureaucracy, then into pensionism, finally
into the bread-and-circus stage, and then disap-
pears. Such a failure was Athens, such a fail-
ure is before our eyes in modern France, France
the land of pose and phrase, egotism and scepti-
cism. Even the ethical code of agnosticism
fades and dies, lacking a higher sanction to
command obedience.

Buddha little thought that his teaching of the
valuelessness of life would result in the callous
cruelty of the Indian and the Chinese. Rous-
seau, if he thought about it at all, could hardly
have dreamed that his scheme of a return to the
simple and the natural life, with every man equal,
would make of France a shambles, and produce
a philosophy of life which, while attempting to
gain the whole world for each individual, not
only loses its soul, but loses the whole world, for
every body of individuals which attempts it.
The time is still seons off when each man may
be his own master. It is a pitiable failure in
the East. It will prove a colossal failure in the
West.

Curiously enough, it was King Asoka, nick-
named "The Furious" in his youth, who, in 260
B. C, became the great apostle and missionary

198 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of Buddhism. The lives he had taken, the suf-
fering he had caused, in the days of his auto-
cratic sway, led him to find comfort and repent-
ance in a creed which abhorred the taking of life.
It was through his influence and the influence
of his saffron-robed priests, of whom he is said
to have supported forty thousand at his own ex-
pense, that Buddhism grew from a mere sect
of enthusiasts into the creed of a third of the
human race, and spread through Asia and
parts of Africa and Europe. The Brahmanism
of Benares is partly the result of this wave of
Buddhism, It is a gentle, mannerly, soft-
spoken crowd, absorbed in forgetting that it
lives. This carelessness of life, on the other
hand, breaks out in monstrous slaughter and
sickening brutalities, as in the Mutiny, when it
loses control of itself. The Mutiny was a pict-
ure of pessimism let loose; the French Revolu-
tion was a picture of how rationalism establishes
the rights of man, or in the happy phrase of that
most skilful and most brilliant modern political
diagnostician. Lord Rosebery, "the fierce equal-
ity of France."

Benares at the present time, so far as buildings
are concerned, is of the most modern. The idol-
breaking Muhammadans left nothing after their
conquering of the city except a spiteful mosque.

RELIGION AND CASTE 199

built by the fanatical Aurangzeb on one of the
sacred sites, which still rears its towers above all
the other buildings on the river bank; and there
are few buildings of an earlier date than the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century. But the Ganges
has never been conquered, nor turned aside, nor
has the Hindu faith.

They are here by the thousands this morning,
washing themselves, washing their clothes, sit-
ting wrapt in contemplation some of them, only
their lips moving. Old and young, men and
women, all bathing, and in curiously decent fash-
ion. Their arrangement of clothing must be pe-
culiar, for they undress, and dress, and bathe,
and somehow each one so manages his or her
clothing that there is not a hint of indecency or
even of immodesty. You are rowed along with-
in a few feet of the bank of the river where these
thousands are bathing, drying themselves, dress-
ing and undressing, and nothing could be more
sedately proper. You see the Brahman rub-
bing his sacred triple thread round and round
his shoulder and body, others scrubbing their
mouths violently with their fingers, others wash-
ing their clothes, babies being dipped by father
or mother, and soundly rubbed afterward, youths
more particular, using combs; and higher up on
the bank the barbers are busy, shaving and cut-

200 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ting hair, while the customer sits cross-legged,
holding a mirror.

Even my travelled Brahman friend, who told
me that he was what we would call a Unitarian,
wore, and showed me, his sacred thread. The
Rajput father binds round the arm of his son a
string made of a sacred grass which is to ward off
evil spirits. No doubt the sacred cord of the
twice-born castes of India originated in a simi-
lar belief. The cord is made in various ways.
"Among the Madras Brahmans, who are most
careful in such matters, it is of fine country-
grown cotton, not foreign, and spun by hand.
Three very fine threads are twisted by a Brah-
man into a single cord sixteen feet long. He then
squats on the ground, winds it thrice around his
knees, and fastens the ends in a special knot
known as that of Brahma." In the north, the
four fingers of the hand are closed, and a thread
is wound back and fourth over them ninety-six
times. This thread forms one strand of the cord,
and three of them make it complete. During
worship of the gods it remains over the left shoul-
der; when the wearer is unclean, or when he per-
forms the rites for the dead, he shifts it to the
right shoulder.

The thread is put on a boy between his eighth
and twelfth year, when he is supposed to assume

RELIGION AND CASTE 201

the religious obligations and the authority and
duty of a Brahman. When the thread is first
put on the boy he makes pretence of leaving the
house to become an ascetic, but he is, of course,
persuaded to return and live as a layman.

It seemed to me strange that there was no
swimming. In any Western crowd there would
have been scores of boys and men diving, swim-
ming, playing games in the water; but there is
no sign of any desire for exercise or play here.
Rubbing themselves, thrashing their clothes on
the flat rocks, moving their lips and hands in
prayer, but no other exercise.

They are a sitting, riding race, not a walking
or running one. Their posture is as peculiar
to them as their color. It is always the same,
wherever you see them, whether it be the prince
in his palace, these people praying by the river-
bank, the passengers waiting for the train at the
railway stations, or sitting on the seats in the
train, your bearer waiting outside your door, or
the cab-driver on his box in the great cities. The
hinges in their knees must be different from ours.
They squat down with their knee-caps under
their chins, and that part of their persons which
the French describe as oil le dos change de nom
close up against their heels. I was told at Udai-
pur that His Highness, the Maharana of Udaipur,

202 THE WEST IN THE EAST

has no chairs in his private apartments, but al-
ways sits cross-legged on the floor, whether to eat,
or to read, or to rest. When you return to your cab
you will find the driver almost invariably perched
up on the seat with his legs under him., Thou-
sands of years of chairlessness have made this
the most comfortable posture for them. I sup-
pose in a country of three hundred millions of
people there is only room for them to sit on the
ground, and, at any rate, among these people
there is no money to provide any piece of furni-
ture which is, at one and the same time, so con-
venient to carry, and so cheaply upholstered, as
that part of the person, ou le dos change de nom!
Benares is evidently a cosmopolitan place; you
notice the difference in the people as you drive
or walk through the streets. They are less shy,
the women do not cover their faces so care-
fully, they are more accustomed to strangers, and
well they may be, since it is estimated that there
are a million pilgrims here every year, who come
to bathe, to pray, and to take the long, dusty
walk, or pilgrimage, of some forty-five miles,
around the sacred precincts of the city. Into the
sacred waters of the Ganges, too, every Hindu
wishes his ashes thrown. At one of the Ghats on
the bank I saw bodies burning, and others lying
waiting to be burned.

RELIGION AND CASTE 203

Both here and at Bombay I have been present
at these burnings. The bodies are brought in
on a frail litter. A pile of logs is built up, held
in place by four iron stanchions. The body
with the head uncovered is placed on the logs,
more logs are piled on top, the litter is broken
up and added to the small fagots underneath, and
the fire is lighted. There are various ceremo-
nies connected with the rite. The body is car-
ried several times around the pile before being
placed upon it. The nearest relative walks
around the pile with a jar of water, letting it drip
down as he goes, till of a sudden he dashes the
jar to the ground, breaking it to pieces. A sym-
bol of all life, everywhere. At a certain mo-
ment, too, the skull is fractured by the nearest
relative, to allow the easy escape of the spirit to
another world. Where the deceased is rich, the
fire is made of costly and sweet-smelling wood,
sandal-wood and the like, and the ceremonies
are more elaborate and more prolonged. No
doubt it is the ideal way to dispose of a dead
body, but when I have seen it done here it
seemed to me a callous and a careless rite.

It is true, if one have faith death should not be
a cause of mourning, but parting from those one
adores is a poignant sorrow, even if there is to be
another meeting here on earth. So far as I have

204 THE WEST IN THE EAST

studied the faces of mourners here, I could see
nothing. In these matters they are either be-
hind or very far in advance of us. No doubt
Mrs. Annie Besant, who has her Hindu College
here at Benares, and her Theosophical Institu-
tion at Adyar near Madras, would maintain the
latter. She and her former associates Colonel
Olcott and Madame Blavatsky preach the su-
periority of the Hindu system to any philosophy
or rehgion of the West. One cannot perhaps
curtail the freedom of speech of these people,
but they can hardly be accepted as scholarly
authorities in the study of the ethnic religions.
It would be a useful addition to the curriculum
of one of our great universities if there could be
lectures on applied ethnic religions, as there are
lectures on applied ethics. I have noticed all
over India the absolute indifference of the natives
themselves to the pain, and deformities and mal-
adies that are displayed as an excuse for alms.
It is not the stoicism of our Western Indians who
thought it dishonorable to show fear, or to shrink
from pain, but an imbedded indifference, a
numbness to this particular influence. We, on
the contrary, dislike the sight of these things, and
turn from them, and pity is forced from us, but
all such spectacles seem to pass absolutely un-
noticed by the Oriental. And what horrible de-

RELIGION AND CASTE 205

formities are exhibited! One might think them
invented and carved, so hideously grotesque are
they sometimes.

It is a wonder there are not more. A wonder,
too, that there is not more plague, more cholera,
more disease of every kind. Here on the banks
of this river are thousands, bathing, washing
their clothes, and drinking, all within a few
yards of one another. One man drinks the
dregs from another man's body, another the
scourings from another's clothes, and women
and children the same. It is not strange that
India is the paradise of contagion.

I have heard it maintained that the Ganges,
which is the most bathed-in river in the world,
is different from other rivers, in that the water
itself has certain antiseptic qualities, and that
microbes do not flourish in it as in other waters.
If one rows up and down the river front, or walks
through the narrow streets leading to the river,
the stench and mud and crowds make it appear
a very incubator of microbes.

I stood for a long time within a small court,
in the middle of which was a much-frequented
temple. Cows stood about in their own filth,
men, women, and children crowded in, went to
the shrine where they bowed and prayed, and
were given something by the attendant, or priest.

206 THE WEST IN THE EAST

which they popped into their mouths. Some
came away with garlands, but all of them evi-
dently impervious to the smells and the mud. It
was warm outside, but in this particular tem-
ple the smell of hot humanity, and hot cow, was
sickening.

Nor Mecca, nor Jerusalem has known such
hordes of worshippers, so many thousands of
years of continuous pilgrimage. No matter
what his caste, no matter what his occupation, no
matter how black his heart or red his hands, the
Hindu who dies within a radius of fifty miles of
Benares is spared all future torment, so it is said.

In the theory of the transmigration of souls,
or metempsychosis, the Hindu believes that there
are some millions of species of animals that he
may be obliged to pass through, one after an-
other, before he arrives at the house of his god,
if he does not pay due attention to the duties and
formalities of his religion. This saving of one's
own soul becomes a very important business un-
der these circumstances. The hell of the most
enthusiastic revivalist is a very lukewarm affair
when compared with this interminable vista of
animal impersonations which confronts the pious
Hindu.

The upper classes and intelligent Hindus have
become Theists, but the mass of the Hindu world

RELIGION AND Cx\STE 207

are crass Polytheists, who worship not only end-
less named gods, but sticks and stones, and trees,
and mounds of earth of their own choosing and
making. On one occasion I asked a lower-caste
Hindu, who had been very attentive in his ser-
vice, if I was not taking too much of his time. I
had noticed that his forehead was not marked, a
sign that he had not bathed and prayed as his
ritual requires. "Oh," he replied, "I have my
own private god in my compound!" On the
other hand, an educated and travelled Hindu,
of whom I saw a good deal, told me that he was
what we would call a "Unitarian!" Another
Brahman, of the mystical type, is said to have
remarked quite casually: "I have never seen
Christ myself, but I have a friend who often sees
him, and he tells my friend that he finds many
of his followers very trying people."

I remember I took a course of study in the
Ethnic Religions when at the University, but of
these mystic refinements on the one hand, and
these crudities on the other, I knew nothing till
I was face to face with them here. One is rather
shocked at the abysmal gulf between the book
and the fact, between the professorial teaching
and the practice, when one is brought into close
contact with the latter in India. As I stand be-
side the reeking cow, ankle-deep in filth, in the

208 THE WEST IN THE EAST

temple of this dark, crowded court in Benares,
and see the earnestness of the worshippers, I am
impressed by the fact that all I know, or may
have known, or shall know, is of little use in
interpreting this situation which is here and
now, and which has been for thousands of
years.

All religions really, whether of Buddha, Brah-
ma, Muhammad, or Christ, maintain that life
is to die. The Buddhist and the Brahman and
the Muhammadan stick to the original text, to
the primitive message. We Westerners have
twisted the Christianity of Christ into a code and
a creed suited to our climate, our environment,
our temperament, and our ambitions, and we
maintain that life is to live. But no philosophy
and no religion which has its roots in the East
can be fairly interpreted as giving such a mes-
sage. We have interpreted isolated texts to please
our love of life, but the founder of Christianity
was an Oriental, with the same profound con-
viction that "my Father's many mansions" are
preferable to hut or palace here, which char-
acterizes the creeds of the Buddhist, the Brah-
man, and the Muhammadan. The Buddhist is
a Buddhist, the Brahman is a Brahman, the Mu-
hammadan is a Muhammadan but we West-
erners are not Christians. We merely wear an

RELIGION AND CASTE 209

ethical cloak, made up of a patchwork of sayings,
which we have wrenched from their context, to
enable us to do our work in the world with free-
dom of movement. Were we to wrap ourselves
in the genuine robes of Christianity we should be
as hampered, and as helpless, as are the thor-
ough-going disciples of Buddha, Brahma, or
Muhammad.

Hiaduism is not only a religious bond, but it
is also a sort of social league governing all the re-
lations of life. As a social league it rests upon
caste, that immovable barrier against reform or
progress ; as a religious bond it rests upon a union
of the Aryan and the Buddhistic faith. Hindu-
ism recognized the so-called twice-born, or Aryan
castes, that is, the Brahmans or priests, the Kshat-
triyas or warriors, the Vaisyas or agriculturists,
and the Sudras or serfs. But this is a mere guide-
book classification. If you investigate the make-
up of an Indian village you may find herdsmen,
fishermen, weavers, artisans, barbers, coolies,
some Muhammadans, some Brahmans, traders,
money-lenders, and here and there Mahrattas,
and a few other immigrants. But even these di-
visions do not begin to complete the list, for there
are still subdivisions of these. Even the Brah-
mans have ten distinct classes or nations, and
these again are divided into some two thousand

210 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tribes. In Bombay alone, where there are more
than a million Brahmans, there are some two
hundred groups of them, none of which inter-
marries with another. In Madras there are six
groups, each speaking a different tongue, and no
member of one group will marry or eat with the
member of another; while each of these groups,
again, has rules regarding the persons within its
own circle, with whom its members may marry
or eat cooked food.

The Brahmans of the south of India claim to
be of higher rank than the Brahmans of the north,
holding that the Brahmanism of the north has
been defiled by one conqueror after another,
while they of the south have remained more or
less untouched by foreign influences. Unlike
the northern Brahman, there is no lower caste
from whom the southern Brahman will take
water.

In this matter of religion, as in political and
social matters, the women of India are bigotedly
conservative, and insistent upon maintaining
all the traditional observances. The most out-
spoken and the fiercest rebels against the Eng-
lish power whom I met in India were women.
The two I remember best were, one the wife of
a prominent Maharaja, and the other the sis-
ter of a distinguished Muhammadan. They were

RELIGION AND CASTE 211

ready to take any measures to rid India of Brit-
ish rule. So, too, the Kshattriyas, or Rajputs,
are divided into some six hundred tribes in differ-
ent parts of India. The authorities say that it
is impossible to number all the castes in India.
They number thousands at least.

When it is remembered that the members of
these different castes cannot intermarry, cannot
eat together, and that as a rule no Hindu of good
caste may eat food prepared by a man of inferior
caste, and that much the same rule obtains in
regard to the drinking of water, one begins to un-
derstand dimly the difficulties inherent in any
dealings with these people, whether for hygienic,
social, or military purposes. Verily, their ways
are not as our ways. Even at the railway sta-
tions in some parts of India you see notices
posted : " Water for Hindus." " Water for Mu-
hammadans."

Just as one example, imagine the difficulty
of helpfulness to one another when the neglected
and the help-needing person may be one whom
to touch, or to come in contact with in any way,
is a social and religious degradation, imperilling
not only one's social position, but one's salvation.
The enlightened ruler of Baroda, His Highness,
the Gaekwar, calls these people the "Untoucha-
bles," a very happy description of them, and he

212 THE WEST IN THE EAST

estimates their numbers at six million, or a fifth
of the population. He, a Hindu of the Maratha
branch himself, says: "The system which divides
us into innumerable castes, claiming to rise by
minutely graduated steps from the Pariah to the
Brahman, is a whole tissue of injustice, split-
ting men equal by nature into divisions high and
low, based not on the natural standard of per-
sonal qualities, but on the accident of birth.
The eternal struggle between caste and caste for
social superiority has become a source of con-
stant ill-feeling in these days. The human de-
sire to help the members of one's caste also leads
to nepotism, heart-burnings, and consequent mu-
tual distrust."

The polluting power of a cat, as an example
of the intricacies of this subject of caste, is small,
of a dog greater, but nothing equals the pol-
lution of a Pariah. Man, in this connection, is
degraded below the beasts. Such people are de-
nied the advantages of social sympathy and in-
dustrial aid. They are denied all influence for
good, arising out of free intercourse with their
neighbors. The full and free use of hospitals,
of public inns, public conveyances, wells, and
even temples, is withheld from them. They are
even refused the opportunities of earning a liv-
ing. Menial service even is denied them, as they

RELIGION AND CASTE 213

cannot touch the food or enter the houses of the
higher castes.

My friend, the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda,
is possibly the most outspoken prince in India,
so I quote another saying of his, that my readers
may know something of his political and social
views: "I can quite understand the difficulty in-
volved in giving up one's inherited ideals of
thought and custom, especially in conservative
India. If the Indian people wish to progress,
and to make the most of their national influence,
they must consciously give up these old false
ideals and open their eyes to the light of prog-
ress, in which not one class or many classes, but
all shall share. Men are asking for a constitu-
tion, by which they may limit the powers of
princes and governments; they neglect to limit
the tyrannical and despotic sway of religion,
which is crushing the life out of our people by
driving out of them all sense of personal pride,
all individuality and ambition. There is no
room in the world of to-day for such priests as are
little gods with an exaggerated idea of their own
importance, insisting upon their infallibility, con-
tent with ignorance, contemptuous of knowledge.
Priests of this kind are a drag on the wheels of
progress. Instead of ministering to the people
they are their bad angels."

214 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Sir Harry Johnston, who at least cannot be ac-
cused of not knowing India, writes: "The one
hundred and sixty-two miUion Hindu men and
women and children follow for the most part
wholly unreasonable forms of religion, quite in-
compatible with modern ideas of physical devel-
opment, social progress, sanitation, avoidance
of cruelty, and unrestricted intercourse with one's
fellow-men." To this he adds: "If all forms
of the Hindu religion — Brahmanism — could be
submitted to an impartial world-congress of non-
Hindus, the members of which were selected from
all parts of non-Hindu Asia, from America, Eu-
rope, and Africa, the Hindu religion would be
universally condemned as a mixture of night-
mare nonsense and time-wasting rubbish, ful-
filling no useful end whatever, only adding to
the general burden borne by humanity in its
struggle for existence. And, of course, so long
as two hundred million Indians remain attached
to these preposterous faiths, with their absurd
and useless ceremonials and food taboos, so long
— if for that reason alone — will the British be
justified in ruling the Indian Empire with some
degree of absolutism."

In this connection, one should remember that
of the fifty-five million adult Muhammadans,
about seventy-five per cent can read and write

RELIGION AND CASTE 215

in Hindustani, and some ten per cent are ac-
quainted with English; while of the one hun-
dred and sixty-two million Hindus only twenty
per cent of the adult males can read and write
in the vernacular, and only three per cent are
acquainted with English.

It is somewhat disconcerting to an observer
and student of Indian affairs, therefore, to find
that it is from the Hindu element and largely
from the Brahman caste that the murderers,
bomb-throwers, seditious editors of the vernac-
ular press, and the men who shoot down the
English officials on platforms and in theatres are
drawn. It can only mean that the great Brah-
man caste, which for centuries have been the
social and political leaders of these timid and
ignorant masses, are jealbus of the English au-
thority. Instead of aiding in all efforts to im-
prove the sanitation, in all efforts to protect the
peasant from the money-lender, in all schemes
for irrigation and education, the Brahman is the
leader of the reactionist party. He prefers, ap-
parently, that the mass of the people should re-
main ignorant, debased, diseased, and helpless,
as his position is magnified by just the width of
the social chasm between himself and them. He
both hates the English and despises his own peo-
ple. He and his people have been the victims of

216 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the Turk, the Tartar, the Mongol, who, times
without number, have swept through the Afghan
passes, and robbed, slaughtered, and deflowered,
but he has always heretofore reappeared as the
religious, social, and political lord of these poor
people. He would rather have chaos again than
see his acknowledged superiority slip away from
him, through the uplifting of the masses, slow
though the process be, by the English rulers.

There are numbers of sympathizers with the
so-called Indian patriots in America, who con-
tribute to their funds and to their excitement.
They should realize that it is the Brahman agi-
tator they are backing, and they should take
some pains to assure themselves that they are not
putting their money on the wrong horse. It is
well enough to sympathize with, I will go farther
and say, and to help any body of men suffering
from the tyranny of injustice and brutality,
whether at home or abroad. Though we have
many such down-trodden people in America
needing attention, it is perhaps excusable in cer-
tain temperaments to prefer the excitement of
participation in revolutions abroad, whei^e at any
rate their own skins may remain whole, whatever
happens. But this attempt of the Brahman agi-
tators to oust the British, or at all events to gain
more offices, more authority, and more power for

RELIGION AND CASTE 217

themselves, is an effort to replace British control
by the rule of the Brahman, which represents the
most tyrannical, the most un-American, and the
most revolting social, religious, and political
autocracy the world has ever seen. How any
American, whatever his ideals or his sympathies,
can lend his influence in support of a movement
to increase the power of the Brahman caste in
India, politically or otherwise, can only be ex-
plained on two grounds : he is either maliciously
mischievous, or he is ignorant. If one were to
search the world to find ideals utterly unlike, and
destructive of American ideals of government, of
religious liberty, and of social freedom, he could
find them nowhere better than in Brahmanism.
The Brahman has never been a fighting-man;
he has fattened upon superstition, and conse-
quently has aided it, and continues to encour-
age it to the utmost, and holds, consequently,
the strange position in India of being a sedi-
tionist as against the English and a reactionary
as against his own people. There is a harsher
word than I care to use for this type of citizen,
but whatever he may be, he is distinctly a
stumbling-block in the present situation. Men
who ask for larger representation in the govern-
ment, knowing full well that they alone are suf-
ficiently educated to profit by it, and who are

218 THE WEST IN THE EAST

inciting the weak-minded to assassinate, and the
ignorant to balk, the alien reformers, are difficult
to deal with, especially when one hears on every
side from disinterested natives that they tremble
at the idea of their future magistrates, having
as much concern with the increase of their sal-
ary as with their caste elevation, and who say:
"It would be treason to humanity to place us
by force of British bayonets under the yoke of
those whose flesh creeps on their bones when
they hear of war." I quote from a Rajput noble
of Oudh.

We have only to picture to ourselves the Pres-
byterians, the Methodists, the Catholics, the
Episcopalians, and the railway employees, the
shop-keepers, the clerks, the barbers, the butch-
ers, the money-lenders, and the lowest class of
laborers, say in Utica, N. Y., divided into sects
and sub-sects, not permitted to intermarry, to eat
together or to touch food cooked one for the
other, to get an idea of the helpless chaos so far
as any effective work or progress as a community
is concerned. And this is by no means an ex-
aggerated picture of thousands of communities
all over India. On the contrary, it is but a
very rough sketch of communities far more mi-
nutely subdivided and far more intricately dis-
associated.

RELIGION AND CASTE 219

This system of caste, which, by the way, is
the great stumbUng-block in the way of native
reformers, whether revolutionary or otherwise, is
not limited to social and religious matters, but
permeates even the industries of the people, since
each caste is also, in a way, a sort of trade-guild.
It makes laws and rules for the different trades,
and even goes so far as to promote and support
strikes.

This is but a passing and superficial state-
ment of a most intricate, and to the Western mind
most incomprehensible, social and religious con-
dition. I mention it not as an indication of eru-
dition, nor as an attempt to explain or to make
clear what years of study and experience would
hardly compass, but to give an example of one
of the most difficult problems facing the Eng-
lish administrators of this huge continent.

It is easy to see that the visible ruler is soon,
and surely, held responsible for everything that
goes wrong. The English government has in-
troduced authority which insists upon standing
absolutely aloof, as it must, from all interfer-
ence in religious matters. But here, as we have
seen, the religious life begins with the brush-
ing of the teeth in the morning, and thoroughly
permeates the hourly life of the people, their
eating, drinking, marrying, and dying. There

320 THE WEST IN THE EAST

are new and strange desires, there are distress
and discontent among the peasants, there is a
rearrangement of classes, there is the ignoring of
caste, as in the railway trains, where all must of
necessity be treated alike.

Fancy the New York Central Railway at-
tempting to cater to the prejudices of Catholics
and Unitarians, Vegetarians and Christian Scien-
tists, New York hoodlums and Brahmans from
Boston, and when I say that such a problem
is easy as compared to this problem of caste
in India, I tell even less than the bare truth.
The government is, of course, blamed for
this by the ignorant. The sages and teach-
ers of the Hindus have been preaching for cen-
turies asceticism as an escape from the distresses
and wearisome problems of life. Now comes a
spirit of progress, rejoicing in and lauding ma-
terial possessions, comfort, and the prolongation
of life. Life is to be a struggle to overcome the
impediments, whether physical or climatic, to
an agreeable existence even in India. Men are
pushed forward to live, and to live as comforta-
bly as possible, who heretofore have been taught
that the heights of human perfection are reached
only by those who live most simply, who ignore
most completely the material side of life, and
who quit most speedily this tenement for another.

RELIGION AND CASTE 221

The Brahman looked forward to absorption in
Brahma, the Buddhist to Nirvana, or absolute
loss of consciousness, so far as the material world
is concerned.

There was a thick-headed citizen of Mar-
seilles who was known to have little enthusiasm
for the church, but who was none the less a fre-
quent attendant at mass. When asked why he
attended mass, he replied: "Oh, j 'attends que
9a soit fini!" There are millions in India who
have that hopeless, helpless air. Their whole
physical and mental attitude seems to say: "Oh,
nous attendons que 9a soit fini!" Into this state
of mind, into this situation, the Englishman in-
troduces the wedge of Western civilization. Rail-
ways, telegraph wires, canals, hospitals, dispen-
saries, police, justice without bribery, and the
cheery Englishman himself, playing, shooting,
making himself comfortable, doing his duty, and
hoping and believing in, not only to-morrow, but
the day after to-morrow. "You need not die if
you don't want to ! " this Western civilization says
to three hundred million people who have seen lit-
tle in life but to die; who look upon disease and dis-
aster, famine and plague, as visitations of God;
who, some of them, have held it blasphemy to
try to cure a small-pox patient, because it must
be a very powerful god who could produce such

222 THE WEST IN THE EAST

an awful disease. In this connection it is fair
to remind readers that even the English were
frightened when vaccination was first intro-
duced, and the more ignorant expressed the fear,
that the race might become minotaurs: semi-
hovemque virum, semivirumque bovem. England
comes blandly ignoring these gods, smilingly sure
that life is worth living, and ready to spend an
immense amount of energy in giving to life,
what every Englishman all over the world be-
lieves to be the only proper setting for such a
jewel — comfort! England comes offering prizes
to those who win material prosperity, and these
people have not merely been taught, but have
had it ground into them for centuries, that ma-
terial possessions are merely the hampering bag-
gage of spirits, which should be always on the
alert to escape to another place.

India, for all these centuries, has had no stand-
ards but those of birth, blood, caste, and the
personal power of conquest. Poverty was no
disgrace; on the contrary, the religious beggar,
the Brahman, the Buddhist priest, however poor,
was a person of dignity, looked up to, and rever-
enced, because he had stripped himself of every
form of wealth. Now India is being inoculated
with the economic lymph of the West, They
see men treated with respect, and placed in dig-

RELIGION AND CASTE 223

nified positions, partly at least because they are
rich. It is hard, for an American particularly,
to understand what a tremendous change this
marks for India. What a man accumulates and
holds counts. This is new to India. This situa-
tion adds measurably to the existing discontent
of an ever-increasing number, who measuring
themselves by this entirely new standard find in-
equalities they equally dislike and do not un-
derstand.

They are beginning to wonder if one may
not at the same time be holy and rich. It is
easier to be good than to be rich and vulgar,
they see evidences of this, but many, none the
less, are being influenced to prefer the latter.

Their own miseries were not enough. They
have now this new source of discontent, the poi-
son of the West; the standard of money! The
social and even political tyranny of the irrespon-
sible rich is yet to be their portion, and their po-
tion, and it will prove more unpalatable to them
than any" that has yet been forced upon them.
They must go through all this, and then, alas!
learn all over again that comfort is not prosper-
ity, that luxury is not culture, and that a mind
besmeared with odds and ends of learning is not
education. Even England and America are only
just beginning to see this.

224 THE WEST IN THE EAST

So far as the masses of India are concerned,
they still preserve and adhere to their centuries-
old polytheism, they worship innumerable gods;
the class slightly above them still worship the
gods of the Hindu pantheon as manifestations
of divinity which is everywhere, in short, they
are Pantheists; while the students, and teachers,
and intellectuals of the higher castes are weav-
ing and unravelling the fine theological threads
which were doing duty for the scholars' exercises
of the fourth century and the school-men of the
Middle Ages. Mr. K. G. Gupta, writing of
orthodox Hinduism, says, "It is mainly and
substantially idolatrous; and image-worship, in
which anthropomorphism plays an important
part, is its principal feature. It has many cults,
many sects, each having its special gods and god-
desses, but all combine to venerate the entire
Hindu pantheon. The worship of a certain
deity representing the active female principle of
the universe is never complete without the shed-
ding of blood, and she has even to plead guilty
to a hankering for human sacrifice." There is
more than one example, even of late years, where
this goddess has been offered human sacrifices
by her ignorant worshippers.

If there were no problems of taxation, of hy-
giene and sanitation, of education, of adminis-

RELIGION AND CASTE 225

tration, of safeguarding the country within and
from without against sedition and attack, to cure
this disease of the religious and social skin, within
which these people move and have their preju-
dices, were surely a task of momentous difficulty
in and of itself. Fortunately for the problem, and
probably for themselves, this hard-playing, unan-
alyzing, governing race of Englishmen, with un-
bounded confidence in themselves, take all these
matters so lightly, ignore them so placidly, dis-
cuss them so flippantly, that for them they cease
to exist. They come and stare at Benares like
children at a pantomime, then return to deal
justly and patiently with three hundred million
wards, as though the whole spiritual and intel-
lectual life of thousands of years and millions of
subjects did not exist.

This ignorance and confidence explain their
success, but these ignored problems are nonethe-
less the fundamental cause of most of their anx-
ieties. These people are so split up into factions,
racial, religious, social, and political, that they
cannot combine to free themselves from their
governors. Herein lies the safety of the Eng-
lish. But 1857, the year of the Mutiny, showed
that if once the religious prejudices can be
touched, then the fire will light and burn. Once
the Muhammadans were persuaded that the ab-

226 THE WEST IN THE EAST

horred pig, and the Hindus that the sacred cow,
were used to make the grease for their cart-
ridges, and that the Russians were beating their
supposedly unbeatable conquerors in the Crimea,
they threw off all allegiance, they forsook friends,
they killed companions and broke the bonds of
years, to an extent that their own officers, who
had lived in the closest intercourse with them,
could not believe possible.

The seditionist of to-day knows full well the
strings to pull to produce another uprising. Not
many months ago it was going the rounds that
the bone-dust of animals was to be mixed with
the sugar, and the Japanese success over white
opponents has been used to the full to inflame
their warlike ambitions. It is only some such
attack upon their religious and racial sensibili-
ties and prejudices that can pervade the mass of
the people, and the Indian anarchist knows it,
and is nowadays again on the lookout for some
such materials to start the blaze.

It is to be remembered, too, as an important
factor in any discussion of caste, that peace has
been maintained in the past, in these thousands
of communities all over India, because the as-
sembly, such as it is, has been influenced by the
men entitled to influence it. When caste is
destroyed, into whose hands will this governing

RELIGION AND CASTE 227

power in all these small communities fall ? The
English thus far have left, to a large extent, these
smaller offices in the hands of those who have
always asserted their right to them by reason of
their blood or caste standing, a right, be it said,
universally and contentedly recognized. There
is no new influence, no new arrangement to sup-
plant this old system, and the old system of caste
is being, even though very slowly, corroded and
eaten away by the civilization of the West. When
it disappears, the governors of India will have an-
other difficult problem to face. They will have
reached the summit of one mountain of reform
only to see another peak beyond. Caste may
interfere with progress, but it undoubtedly helps
mightily to preserve the peace. Caste is a bet-
ter policeman even than the Englishman. Once
this system, which has permeated for thousands
of years and still does permeate all classes in
India, is weakened, or ridiculed out of exist-
ence, all sorts of other superstitions will follow
to create trouble.

There were actual riots in the streets of the
capital of Korea, some years ago, due to a wide-
spread report that the American missionaries
were boiling Korean babies to manufacture
chemicals for photographic processes. This was,
indeed, a tribute to Yankee ingenuity, but it is

228 THE WEST IN THE EAST

also an illustration of what preposterous meth-
ods may be used successfully to breed trouble
among masses of ignorant people.

It is an interesting commentary upon the im-
partial attitude of the English, that while they
pay and protect missionaries in India and else-
where, they are at the same time large manu-
facturers and shippers of idols to these same
countries.

The ordained missionaries in India number
something over a thousand, with about the same
number of native pastors. They have made
practically no impression upon India, and the
best of them, both European and native, admit
as much themselves. The converts are almost
entirely from the lowest class of natives, and from
the Eurasians, that is, those of mixed European
and Indian parentage, a class, by the way,
for whom one has much sympathy, as they are
equally despised and rejected by the English
and the Indians. "In ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred (always excepting the Roman Catholic
Christians of the West Coast) to be a Christian
is to have been a pariah," writes Stanley Rice, a
recognized authority on the subject. Medical
assistance, teaching, and so on by the mission-
aries are valuable, but I doubt whether either
the civilian or the soldier would not willingly see

RELIGION AND CASTE 229

the whole band of missionaries sent home.
Their interest in the native sometimes gets to the
point of mawkishness, leading the native to over-
estimate his own importance, and weakening his
respect for authority. Upon the better-class
Indian mind, the necessary assumption of omni-
science which must underlie all foreign mission-
ary efPort, particularly when many of the mission-
aries are distinctly of the social and intellectual
mediocrity, produces an invulnerable dislike. To
them the theological crazy-quilt, offered them as
a coverlet for their salvation, a patchwork of
Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, Meth-
odist, Lutheran, and Universalist, must lack dig-
nity, subtlety, and beauty of outline.

The Sanskrit word for caste is color. A phi-
lologist might argue that this matter of caste prob-
ably dated from the time when the swarms of
white Aryans came to India, and wished to cut
themselves off and to keep themselves apart from
the darker races they found there. The mission-
ary finds himself balked in his endeavors by his
own logic. If the incarnation is true, then no
race which is Christian can remain ostracized
from and by other Christian races. The Euro-
pean Christians in India are a caste by them-
selves. They will not hear of much social inter-
course, or of intermarriage. Indian Christians

230 THE WEST IN THE EAST

are even barred from the Transvaal by their
brother Christians there. White Christians re-
fuse to meet African Christians even at the sacra-
ment; much more strongly do they persist in os-
tracizing them socially.

Whatever the Indian may be physically and
morally, he is admittedly subtle mentally. To
preach brotherly love at the table of the holy
communion, and to be ready to slay the man who
should propose social intercourse, or marriage,
with your sisters or daughters, is a difficult di-
lemma, a hornless dilemma, in fact, for the mis-
sionary. For the convert, belief in the incarna-
tion is indispensable, but for the white converter
to carry out the plain prescriptions of the incar-
nation is a crime against his race. It is safe to
say that there will be no great missionary prog-
ress among the colored races until this problem
is solved. It is not surprising that the rooted
beliefs of the East are sometimes puzzled into
ferocity. And, alas ! I am bound to admit, as an
outsider, that I am not sure that one does not
see Buddha, Confucius, or Muhammad in the
streets of Rangoon, Peking, and Peshawar, quite
as often as one sees Jesus of Nazareth in the
streets of London, Paris, or New York.

A dozen unmarried women, singing and beat-
ing tambourines, accompanied and led by one

RELIGION AND CASTE 231

man, must necessarily daunt the credulity of the
Muhammadan or the Chinese Buddhist. The
only effective missionaries I have ever met, either
at home or abroad, are those few people, men
and women, who never preach, never pray in
public, and never by any chance argue, but who
make us humble and ashamed by being better
than we are. They convert us by their unvoiced
consistency of conduct. They are unsalaried,
unconscious, but none the less the saviours of the
world. There are, and always have been, a few
lay Englishmen of that stamp in India, and I
have seen some of their converts, and they are
the only converted ones in all India for whose
faith or courage I would give a fig, when put to
the test of the shadow of the cross, or the edge of
a sword. That stanch and fearless churchman,
Bishop Creighton, told less than the truth when
he said: "The conscious missionary is a bore."
He is often a menace to peace. It has been
suggested that one reason there are so many
heathen is that missionaries so often illustrate
in their own persons the unpleasant effects of
salvation.

Praying to a congregation, or to any audi-
ence, any prayer, indeed, except it be inaudible
and in the closet, would seem to be a most
dangerous and daring form of spiritual exer-

232 THE WEST IN THE EAST

cise, a sickening form of idolatry when it is the
mere stringing together of beatific phrases, and
when it is a frenzied tearing off of the spiritual
garments, an awful exposure, more curious than
helpful. All this phase of the matter is even more
apparent to the Oriental than to us, and to them
it is more disconcerting. The number and the
class of the Christian converts in India prove
this. They are practically all of the lowest class,
for whom the bait of food, in time of famine,
and protection, have been the main temptations
to conversion.

But besides the Hindus and the Christians,
and some one hundred thousand Parsis in India,
there are the Jains, a sect which exaggerates
some of the Buddhist doctrines, as, for example,
the extreme concern for animal life, bodily pen-
ance as a necessity for salvation, and so on.
These people maintain hospitals for useless ani-
mals who would otherwise be killed. I have
seen two of these compounds, crowded with
camels, bullocks, cows, water-buffaloes, dogs,
cats, chickens, pigeons, and so on, all kept
alive by this fanatical charity which holds it
wrong to kill a fly, or vermin, even when on the
person.

There are the Sikhs, a sect of Hindus who
recognize no distinctions of caste, worship the

RELIGION AND CASTE 233

Granth, or holy book, have their own teachers
or gurus, and who were at one time, and even as
late as the middle of the eighteenth century, a
formidable military power.

There are the Marathas, who grew from a
military organization of local Hindu tribes in
southern India, into the most formidable mili-
tary and political power in India at the time of
the break-up of the Mughal empire, in the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century.

There are the Muhammadans (they, again,
divided into two sects of Shiahs and Sunnis),
who began their invasions of India about 1000
A, D., and who now number sixty-two mill-
ions, or about one-fifth of the total population.
There are, besides these, numerous tribes, some
of them almost extinct, who are practically sav-
age relics of the aborigines and their Animistic
worship.

The differences between these various sects
and tribes and religions before the British came,
were not merely the epicene pulpit quarrels, such
as mark our Western theological polemics, mat-
ters that do not interfere with inter-dining and
dancing, but matters of life and death. Mon-
tesquieu writes : " Apres tout, c'est mettre ses con-
jectures a bien haut prix, que d'en faire cuire
un homme tout vif." But these people did not

234 THE WEST IN THE EAST

hesitate to clothe their beliefs with full sanction
to use both fire and sword. So far as one can see,
the vitality of these main beliefs is unimpaired,
and the pilgrimages to Mecca, to Rangoon, and
to Benares show no lessening of numbers nor of
enthusiasm.

If one is to see anything in Benares except
a diversely colored peripatetic laundry on an
enormous scale, one must have some such thread
of knowledge upon which to string one's impres-
sions. How can there be any such thing as na-
tional or patriotic feeling in India as a whole!
The people of Bombay, of Bengal, of Peshawar,
of Madras, of the Punjab can only slowly grow
to feel that they belong to one great Indian na-
tion. Their speech even is so different that the
man in Madras can no more understand the man
from the Punjab than the Spaniard can under-
stand the Russian.

Not only the differences are great, as between
a low-class Hindu propitiating demons and wor-
shipping trees, plants, stones, rivers, water-tanks,
cows, crocodiles, peacocks, all held to be sa-
cred in certain parts of India, and the high-class
members of the two reformed bodies, the Arya
Somaj and the Brahma Somaj, who reject all
idol-worship, and have refined the Hindu relig-
ious philosophy to the point of radical Unitarian-

RELIGION AND CASTE 235

ism ; but the numbers are enormous. There are
over 200,000,000 Hindus, more than 60,000,000
Muhammadans, more than 9,000,000 Buddhists,
nearly 9,000,000 Animists, besides Sikhs, Jains,
Parsis, and a sprinkling of Jews and Christians.

It is estimated that there are 1,544,510,000
people in the world. Of these 175,290,000 are
Muhammadans, 300,000,000 are Confucians,
214,000,000 are Brahmans, 121,000,000 Buddh-
ists, 534,940,000 are Christians, 10,860,000 are
Jews, and other bodies of lesser numbers. The
number of Christians given by the German
statistician I quote is, I believe, exaggerated.
Where can he count so many.?

More than half the people in the world live in
India and China, and these figures give one some
notion of the colossal loaf of paganism that it is
the ambition of the missionary to leaven. These
figures, too, tell the tale of the bathing, praying
thousands on the banks of the river Ganges at
Benares, but they give the reader, also, I hope,
some idea of the terrifying proportions of the
problem of the British ruler in India.

He is not only dealing in India with these un-
known, and almost incomprehensible, diversities
of creed, and custom, and ancient precedent, but
also with the problem common to all of us every-
where, of the political status of the individual,

236 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of his rights, and of the quality and quantity of
his participation in legislation.

No Oriental nation will hear that women have
been given a vote, and thereby a voice in how
they shall be governed, without a vocal and phys-
ical protest such as no mutiny even can parallel.

Great Britain is being assaulted just now by
women demanding the suffrage. What will hap-
pen among Hindus and Muhammadans, with
their notions of the position of women, should
women be given the vote, is rather beyond or-
dinary imaginative powers. Orientals are all
bom and bred aristocrats. It is the Indians
who visit England, and who discover how un-
Brahman are many of their rulers there, who
return to spread the seeds of discontent even now.
The Oriental, of all others, knows the folly of
the rights of man.

Rousseau begins his Control Social: "L'hom-
me ne libre, est partout dans les fers." The
profound error here, but one that has unduly ex-
cited the world, is that man is not born free, he
is, on the contrary, born in chains. He begins
life in chains, chains of parentage, of inheritance,
of environment, of capability, of disposition, of
looks, of strength, physical and moral. All dis-
cussions of liberty are founded upon this gross
error. Some men achieve a certain liberty, but

RELIGION AND CASTE 237

they are all, everywhere, born to slavery! No
political philosopher of the West knows as well
as does the Oriental that it is the weak who are
always screaming for liberty, while the strong
are forever asking for more strength and courage
to bear the responsibilities that liberty has put
upon them, not the least of which is the protect-
tion of the weak, by assuming the right to rule.
In these days, indeed, it is very much to be
doubted whether the weak are more burdened
by the chains of subordination than are the strong
by the chains of responsibility.

It is an enlightening commentary upon the dif-
ficulties to be met in the evolution of the free-
dom of the individual, to read the report of the
Society of Comparative Legislation upon the
legislation of the British Empire. For the ten
years ending in 1907 twenty-five thousand new
laws were made by men for the restriction of
their own liberties in the British Empire ! First,
men strike off the chains of the church, of feud-
alism, of autocracy which bind them, and then
with a new system, with self-government, in a
new era, they are finding that the new liberties
must have new masters, and they turn to laws
for their masters.

The variety of problems and peoples in the
British Empire is shown by the variety of sub-

238 THE WEST IN THE EAST

jects dealt with by these laws. There are laws
punishing witchcraft and widow-burning; there
are laws about animals, and even about inani-
mate objects, as in Athens, where if a tree fell
on a man and killed him the tree was solemnly
tried and outlawed.

This glut of law-making is by no means con-
fined to the British Empire. We in America
have many and ludicrous examples of it. The
horse breaks his harness and is free, free to
cut himself to pieces running through the
crowded streets. The lion breaks out of his
cage and cowers in a corner, bewildered by his
freedom. Men break away frora one tyranny,
only to harness themselves in a mesh of knots
and buckles more hampering than before.

The intelligence, the experience, and the wis-
dom of the world have no wish to enslave or to
hamper individual liberty. Certainly we Ameri-
cans have no such ambition, nor have the Brit-
ish, but just to take the harness off the horse does
not solve the problem. Germany and Japan are
ominous examples of how happy is the horse, and
how well he goes when harnessed, handled, and
housed by one coachman in supreme control.

We cannot be sure that we are not cutting
away at individual initiative, at independence, at
personal prowess and courage, by this weaving

RELIGION AND CASTE 239

a web of laws around the individual, even though
they be supposedly for his protection and well-
being. It may be that he is better off, after all,
with a master, rather than with all as masters.
This much, at least, must be said for those who
hesitate, and counsel delay rather than haste,
when dealing with India, and Egypt, and the
Philippines. Democracy's coeksureness may
land us all scrambling at the feet of a dictator.
Liberty is a far more complicated problem to deal
with than tyranny, and few there are who recog-
nize it. Those who read these scanty sketches of
the history, and of the domestic, religious, and
social problems of India, will, I hope, share with
me the feeling that a nation with such a gigantic
problem to solve, should be judged and criti-
cised with extreme care, and always with a lean-
ing toward leniency ; and that we Americans, with
our increasing responsibilities, both at home and
abroad, in the governing of the colored races,
should be the last to criticise ignorantly, or to
counsel others to walk, or to walk ourselves, un-
warily.

VI

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA

INDIA is governed by the British, but only-
part of it is governed directly by them. Of
the 1,766,642 square miles of India, 690,000
square miles are under the rule of the native
princes, as are 66,000,000 out of the 300,000,000
inhabitants. There are some 6,000 native chiefs,
big and little, from the Nizam, the ruler of Hyder-
abad, with its population of 11,000,000, its terri-
tory of 82,698 square miles, and its revenues of
$12,000,000, down to a petty chief with a few
square miles of territory, and a few thousands a
year of revenue.

There is as much variety in their breeding, and
bearing, and ability as in their territories and reve-
nues. Some of them trace their ancestry straight
back to the first conquerors from the north ; oth-
ers are descended from Arab, Tartar, or Afghan
invaders; others are the descendants of court
favorites, and their ancestral right to rank is as
illegitimate as some of the proud names in Eng-
land and France; while others are heirs of rough

240

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 241

soldiers who grabbed what they could and held
it when the Mughal Empire went to pieces. Some
are highly educated, others ignorant; some are
Anglicized, some Pariscized, devoting much time,
those to cricket, racing, polo; and these to such
European travel as they are permitted, and lazy
licentiousness both at home and abroad. There
are fine gentlemen among them, as chivalrous
and as proud as any noble in Europe, and there
are others who are mere naughty school-boys.
There are not a few who spend their money on
schools and colleges and museums, on irriga-
tion works and tramways, on roads and bridges
and model prisons, and who pride themselves
on the efficiency and smartness of their Imperial
Service troops; and others who throw thousands
about on motor-cars, jewels, dancing-girls, or
favorite wives, and hideous Brummagem fur-
niture and pictures. There are burly, heavy-
shouldered, big-hipped, gross-featured princes,
who look like brown caricatures of some of
Rubens's women; and there are lithe, muscular,
fine-featured fellows, who look fit for a tussle with
a tiger, and show their breeding even to their
finger-tips.

"The control which the supreme government
exercises over the native states varies in degree;
but they are all governed by the native princes,

242 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ministers, or councils with the help and under the
advice of a resident or agent, in political charge
either of a single state or a group of states. The
chiefs have no right to make war or peace, or to
send ambassadors to each other or to external
states; they are not permitted to maintain a mil-
itary force above a certain specified limit; no
European is allowed to reside at any of their
courts without special sanction ; and the supreme
government can exercise any degree of control
in case of misgovemment. Within these limits
the more important chiefs are autonomous in
their own territories. Some, but not all of them,
are required to pay an annual fixed tribute."

It can be no easy task to govern these semi-
independent princes; not to hurt their pride; not
to offend their sensibilities, for they are very
touchy people indeed ; not to restrict their liberty
too much and yet to keep the less self-respecting
among them within bounds; not to interfere in
social and religious matters, or between them and
their subjects and neighbors, and yet to exert a
constant influence for rational government; to
shoot and ride and play games with them, and
yet to keep well aloof from familiarity; to keep
constantly informed of their doings at home and
abroad, and yet not to appear to pry, or to be
suspicious; to be called upon for advice in the

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 243

most delicate family affairs, as well as in matters
of state, and to keep a detached mind and main-
tain a just neutrality; this calls for a very unu-
sual type of man.

I wish I were not debarred by my own rule
of not mentioning names, from giving here and
now a picture of one of my English hosts, who
is an ideal servant of his country, in a position of
this kind. He is the resident or political agent
who has under his supervision a number of the
native princes, one or two of them of great im-
portance, and it was my good fortune to be his
guest, when, by reason of a meeting of the chiefs,
I saw him in personal contact with them. It
was a revelation of what one quiet man's influ-
ence can do, and of the control that can be won,
without apparent effort, by a man possessing the
rare qualities I have described as necessary to
cope with such a problem. I sometimes won-
der if England knows the value of some of her
servants out here.

Many Englishmen, whose fate and fortune
and empire, are dependent upon the success of
their rule in India, seem to be interested in
India as sympathetically and as intelligently as
the Irishman in the funeral procession. The
long line of carriages was obliged to halt at a
certain street-crossing. A passer-by near one of

244 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the carriages asked an Irishman sitting inside
whose funeral it was. "Shure an' I dunno,"
was the reply, "I'm only in for the roide."

However, my host and others like him are not
looking for sympathy and not stopping to think
often whether their work is appreciated or not,
so long as the British Babus in Parliament do
not interfere with them. They probably real-
ize, as do all men who do the hard work of the
world, that the ladder on which the angels de-
scend is usually set up in a stony place, as it was
in the time of Jacob. I have no brief for this
civil service of the British in India, and my praise
will probably never reach their ears, but I cannot
forbear the expression of my admiration for
some of the residents, political agents, judges,
commissioners, and deputy commissioners I met
and saw at work there. They are doing delicate,
difficult, and dangerous work, with a coolness,
devotion, and uprightness unequalled and unap-
proached by anything I have ever seen else-
where in the world, and withal without the
slightest attempt to advertise themselves. If I
were in such a position, I should be made cyni-
cal, indeed, by some of the snap criticism from
travellers and politicians, and from the Oxford
and Cambridge Babus from England and else-
where.

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 245

We Westerners are not the sole progeny of
light. Our civilization is only dawning, and big
with possible disasters ; but some critics from the
East assume that our social, political, and ethi-
cal weights and measures have been tested and
stamped with approval in heaven; and the more
crude and unkempt the civilization they repre-
sent, the more categorical are the prophets
thereof.

I was honored by invitations from about a
dozen of the native princes, and the story of
some of these visits it will be a pleasure to tell,
and I regret that I have not space for all.

The journey from Bombay to the native state
of Baroda was our first experience of railway
travel in India. The train was to leave a little
before eight o'clock in the morning, and the rail-
way station was at some distance away. The
bearer with bullock-carts piled high with lug-
gage got off before dawn. We had ordered cabs
for the early start to the station, but when we
appeared there were no conveyances of any kind,
no knowledge on the part of any one at the hotel
that we were to leave, or that cabs were wanted,
and no inclination to solve the problem. It
seemed to strike the hotel servants as prepos-
terous that we should be excited, and determined
to catch the train we had planned to go by.

246 THE WEST IN THE EAST

We discovered after some months in India,
that the Oriental way is to make a pilgrimage
to the railway station, settle down quietly on the
platform, or at some convenient place near by,
cook, eat, bathe, enjoy the excitement of incom-
ing and outgoing trains, not infrequently to try
to bargain with the ticket-seller as to the price
of tickets, on the assumption that by holding
off for some hours they may be had cheaper,
and thus to get away gradually somewhere
within twenty-four hours of the time one ar-
rives at the station. To pull out your watch,
call a cab, and get to the train you intend to
go by, and all within an hour, seems to them
like rushing to the theatre to see the curtain go
up, and then leaving.

It may be impossible to hurry the East along
large administrative lines, but it is a mistake to
suppose that at a pinch the determined traveller
with some power of imperative gesture, and a
comprehensive vocabulary of the monosyllabic
expletives which England has taught the mean-
ing of to all the tribes of earth, cannot prick this
inertia into obedient and rapid motion. At any
rate I claim to have done so, not once but many
times. The climate is ill adapted to sudden vio-
lent expenditures of heat, whether in the form of
rhetoric or gesticulation, and the consequent open-

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 247

ing of the pores may lead to catching cold, but
with a cholera-belt, without which no one should
travel in these climates, this danger is largely
minimized, and one may undertake to hurry the
East, on a small scale, without undue risk.

The cars, or carriages, in the Indian trains
are divided into compartments for four persons
with the seats facing the sides, and not the end
of the train. We usually had one of these to
ourselves, and with your folding-table and chair,
spirit-lamp, supply of mineral water, and some
food, I found the travelling very comfortable.
At night these long seats are widened by draw-
ing them out slightly, your bedding is put on
them, and I have travelled many nights in this
way, and in spite of stifling heat sometimes, and
bitter cold sometimes, and the most amazingly
penetrating powdery dust, our alkali plains, or
Mexican dust are nothing in comparison, I must
admit that there was little to grumble at. This
is not the verdict of many travellers, I know,
and though I believe a man ought to claim com-
fort when it is his right, I may be, these days,
rather an easy-going traveller whose experiences
ought not to tempt the finical and the fussy to
repeat them.

When your belongings are all in the carriage,
hat-boxes, helmet-cases, medicine-cases, gun-

248 THE WEST IN THE EAST

cases, bedding, table, chair, bags of all sorts and
sizes, food and water, spirit-lamp and night-
lantern, cameras, sticks and umbrellas, hold-alls,
pillows, etc., etc., you feel prepared to go on, or
stop, or to cope with any emergency. These
various impedimenta accumulate gradually. If
you deviate at all from the main lines of travel
you discover that there is no sending out to buy
a pen, or ink, or a chair, or a hot-water bottle,
or medicine, or a white tie, or what not that you
have forgotten; and not infrequently medicine,
or hot- water, or a lantern, or towels makes the
difference between discomfort, and even illness,
and comfort. And moreover the man or woman
who takes any risk of being ill in India, and it is
a trying place, will be fully recompensed and
severely punished. It is expected that you will
travel in this caravan fashion. There are coo-
lies innumerable everywhere, and the more you
have the more autocratic and authoritative is
your bearer, and the more consideration he re-
ceives.

When we were later the guests of His Highness
the Maharana of Udaipur, I saw a number of
tents pitched near the palace, and asked what
they were. I was told that the daughter of the
prince was visiting him, she being the wife of
the Maharaja of Jodhpur whose capital was not

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 249

very far away. For her ten days' visit to her
father she was accompanied by a retinue of
five hundred people! So although our carriage
looked rather full when we entered it to start for
Baroda, it was really a trifling supply of neces-
sities compared with the usages of polite society
in this land. In most of the carriages is a small
compartment for native servants next to the first-
class compartment and opening into it. As your
bearer is not only servant but interpreter, who
must be ever at hand to act as go-between when
you want fruit or tea or water, and to ask ques-
tions for you in regard to time-tables, tickets,
eating-stations, and other matters incident to
travel, it is recognized by the railway companies,
as by everybody else in India, that he must be
provided with accommodation close at hand.
At the hotels he sleeps outside your door, when
you visit he finds a place within reach of the
noise of clapping hands, and as he has never
known the luxury of chairs, beds, or tables, and
would not know what to do with them if they
were his, his choice of quarters is easy and means
no hardship.

The railway fares both for native servants
and for the natives are cheap, and in this land
of pilgrimages, these cheap train journeys are
very popular. Here at any rate the rigidity of

250 THE WEST IN THE EAST

caste prejudices is softened, and one sees car-
riage after carriage jammed full of men, women,
and children, their bedding, their pots and pans,
and all that is theirs, and the more that can crowd
into one carriage the happier they seem to be.
Many times I have seen carriages only half full
while others were overcrowded, and I have asked
if all the carriages were for the same destination,
merely to satisfy myself that these people were
really crowding themselves voluntarily.

This question of the treatment of the natives
in railway trains is often referred to, and many
are the anecdotes one hears of the bad manners
and roughness both of English travellers and
English railway management. My experience of
travel was comparatively limited, though I cov-
ered between seven and eight thousand miles,
and journeyed from end to end, and twice clean
across India. Once or twice native gentlemen
travelled in the same carriage, when I was alone,
and I never saw any rudeness except on the part
of the minor native railway officials to travellers
of their own race. Once, sometime after mid-
night, I saw an English officer pile out of his
carriage in his pajamas and slippers and soundly
berate a native official who was bullying a third-
class native woman passenger.

The manners and habits of even the better

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 251

class Indians are not as ours, and one would
naturally avoid travelling in the same carriage
with them. It is to be remembered in this con-
nection that it is of all tests the severest to travel
together, and that the Englishman is both shy
and selfish. Even in his own country, his recep-
tion of a stranger who enters the railway carriage
in which he has made himself comfortable is of
the most frigid, the most erinaceous. On the
whole I think he behaves better in India than
at home, when he travels. All great travellers
from Gulliver to Cook prefer to travel alone.

We arrived at Baroda in the early evening.
Late in the afternoon as I was looking out I saw
a picture that many times since I have regretted
that I could not imprison with brush or pencil and
keep, as typical of East and West. On the roof
of a lightly built staging in the middle of a dis-
tant field, where she was standing no doubt to
keep the birds from the grain, stood a woman
draped in her deep red sari, one hand on her
hip, the other shading her eyes as she watched
the passing train. The sun was setting, the
glow of the sky behind her made her stand out
like a statue, and I wondered what she thought;
whether she liked it, hated it, feared it, de-
spised it, longed to be in it, or wished it away.
When the interpreter comes who can make that

252 THE WEST IN THE EAST

statue of India talk, we shall know many things
that no one has told us.

When we left our carriage at the station at
Baroda, we were instantly swallowed up in a
pushing, haggling, gesticulating mass of brown
arms and legs, with turbans bouncing about on
top of them, whom our bearer dealt with as
though they were troublesome insects; shortly
there was silence and order, and several emis-
saries from His Highness the Maharaja Gaekwar
of Baroda greeted us on his behalf, showed us to
our carriage, and we were driven away; later a
procession of bullock-carts followed with the
luggage, Heera Tall making himself felt as was
his wont when our importance and our comfort
were to be explained, no doubt with help from
his imagination, to those who were to serve us.

We all have our idiosyncrasies as guests no
doubt. Personally I care very little what kind
of a bed I am given because I can sleep anywhere
and on almost anything; I have more than once
nodded in a dentist's chair and on horseback;
but an open fire in my room delights me, a good
tub and plenty of water and towels, a well-
furnished writing-table, these seem to me indis-
pensable ; and if in addition I find a book or two
worth reading that I have not read, my happiness
is complete and I consider my host an accom-

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 253

plished provider. But these are trifles to your
Oriental host. He takes you from the station in
a carriage with two turbaned servants on the box
and two standing on the foot-board behind; he
puts a whole house at your disposal with a stew-
ard and a staff of servants ; you have but to order
your carriage or a saddle-horse when they are
wanted; and one of your host's own officers or
secretaries is at your beck and call as guide and
interpreter. He does not take you to the play,
but he sends his whole troop of musicians and
singers and dancing-girls to give you an enter-
tainment in your own drawing-room; he orders
his athletes and wrestlers, and there were a score
or more of them, to perform for you alone;
temples, palaces, schools, hospitals, are open
and ready for you to inspect; his army is called
out for you to review; his cheetahs and an army
of beaters are there to give you a day's hunting
of the deer; his elephants, his wonderful white
bullocks, his stable of horses, all these are at
your disposal. If you are interested in any or all
of these things, he is the more delighted to have
you for a guest, and the more willing to show you
everything, and the more eager that you should
prolong your visit. What puzzles him and those
about him is that you should have fixed dates
for other visits, that you should consider time

254 THE WEST IN THE EAST

as a factor, permit time to tyrannize over your
inclinations. Why not stay on a month with
him, and let these other matters regulate and
adjust themselves ? This is a much to be de-
sired characteristic in a host to be sure, but one
sometimes wonders if it does not prove an awk-
ward thing when matters of business, of diplo-
macy, of administration are to the fore.

The Maharaja of Baroda, or to give him his
official title, His Highness Maharaja Sir Sayaji
Rao Gaekwar of Baroda, G. C. S. I., governs a
State of some eight thousand five hundred square
miles, an area slightly larger than Massachusetts,
with a population of two millions, and revenues
of something over four million dollars. My first
meeting with him in his summer palace revealed
a man about five feet six in height, heavily built,
but light on his feet and graceful of movement,
and dressed in fine white muslin. He speaks
both English and French, has been twice around
the world, knows Europe and the United States
well, and is educating his sons, one in England,
and one at Harvard University. He is, or as-
sumed that mental attitude for my benefit, a
frank admirer of American institutions and the
American people, and hinted guardedly that if
ever a change came in the government of India
it might be somewhat along American lines, of

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 255

a federation of states under a central govern-
ment.

He is inclined to believe, as do practically all
the educated and intelligent Indians, that the ex-
clusive, aloof, and unsympathetic attitude of the
British is responsible for the strained relations, so
far as they are strained, claiming that distrust
breeds distrust. Of his own reforms, and no
native prince in India has attempted more in-
telligently and persistently to better the condi-
tion of his people, he said that they were dis-
liked by his people largely through ignorance,
and that once they were understood they were
appreciated. He said, and profound and true
it is, that an autocrat was possible and permissi-
ble so long as the people were left largely to them-
selves, and to their own social and political de-
vices; but that once you introduced social re-
forms, interfered in their daily lives, tried to
change their customs, insisted upon attendance
at school, vaccination, hygienic regulations, en-
tered, in short, upon a detailed regulation of their
intercourse with one another and the outside
world, then autocracy was unbearable and im-
possible, and that the people must be given a
voice in their own government, when their imme-
diate and personal concerns M'ere thus investigated
and dealt with.

256 THE WEST IN THE EAST

He spoke freely of the ignorance of the people
he governed, and said that even his own relatives
disapproved of his travelling and of his eating
with strangers. He admitted, owing to religious
views, daily habits of eating, drinking, and bath-
ing, the fine web of custom and tradition which
holds the Hindus in its meshes every hour of
the day, that intercourse and sympathy with
foreigners was not easy. He thought political
autonomy to be a long way off, but again re-
verted to an expression of the feeling, that prog-
ress might be faster if the British were more
sympathetic, more trusting.

That is always the master thought, the irri-
tant factor, the beginning and the end of all the
scores of conversations I have had with the edu-
cated Indians, this criticism of the cold, stolid
self-sufficiency of the British. The Indians do
not realize that they are not alone in this feeling,
that Frenchmen, Germans, Irishmen, Ameri-
cans all say the same, that it is the major defect
of their great qualities. One can hardly expect
the Oriental to hold the balance true in these
matters when so few of the Occidental critics
have been able to do so. Few of us are big
enough to judge others by their superiorities
rather than by their weaknesses and littlenesses.
Poke fun at the weaknesses if you like, that is

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 257

the salt of life, that sense that we are all of us,
even the best of us, slightly ridiculous when
looked at in certain lights, but never forget that
it is the power that drives the engine that counts,
not the smoke from the escape-pipe. Most crit-
icism seems to devote itself to the bad smells at
the mouth of the vent-pipe, hence its slight value.
"They but rub the sore, when they should bring
the plaster."

Our days were full at Baroda. The Aide as-
signed to us turned out to be a Brahman gentle-
man recently returned from the United States,
where he had been the companion of the young
prince; and his English speech, and courteous
manners and intelligence, smoothed the way for
my ardent curiosity, which began with a review
of the Baroda army on horseback at half-past
five o'clock in the morning, and continued
through the day with visits to schools, libraries,
hospitals, wrestling-schools, elephant stables,
armories, state jewels, and ended at eleven at
night, with a performance in our drawing-room
by His Highness's musicians and dancing-girls.

In the guide-book under the heading Baroda
it reads: "Good refreshment and waiting-rooms
and sleeping accommodation." These words,
and my experience in Baroda, mark emphati-
cally the difference between seeing India as a
tourist and seeing India as a guest.

258 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Baroda is policed and lighted, the streets are
watered, there is a good supply of water brought
into this city, which has a population of over
one hundred thousand, from a lake eighteen
miles away, the schools are well attended, the
hospitals clean, and the jail governed in most
humane fashion, the prisoners being all kept at
work at carpet, or rug, or basket, or rope making.
I visited a model farm where experiments are
being made in cotton growing, tobacco grow-
ing, breeding of silk-worms, and where I saw a
guava orchard, and English vegetables, cabbage,
cauliflower, and tomatoes growing.

Next to my gallop with Captain Pathak's cav-
alry, the visit to a native village at some distance
from Baroda gave me as much pleasure as any-
thing. Part of the way we went in a carriage,
and the last part of the way over the rougher
roads, in a bullock-cart drawn by a pair of the
famous white bullocks. We were greeted on
our arrival by the whole village, with the im-
portant men at their head. They conducted
me to a covered-in space with a table and chair,
and the fathers of the village sat cross-legged
on the floor in front of me. The head men of
these villages are often office-holders by heredity;
in this particular case no one could remember
when a representative of this man's family had
not been head man. The village seemed to be

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 259

governed by seven, three appointed by the gov-
ernment, three elected, and the head man.
There was a town clerk who explained to me
the method of election, the way the accounts
were kept, and so on.

It should be recalled to the reader in this
connection that in India, with few commercial
towns and a huge agricultural population, self-
government was highly developed in these vil-
lages centuries ago. The kings or emperors had
absolute power in the empire, but they left the
villages with a free hand to govern themselves.
The Indians of those days enjoyed more civic
rights, more control over their village affairs,
than did the villagers of Europe, who in many
places were little better than serfs. When Brit-
ish rule came, with its strong central govern-
ment, village government naturally declined.
The villagers became less interested in the po-
lice, schools, charities, roads, wells, tanks, small
civil and criminal cases, and learned to lean upon
the central government.

In Baroda, the Gaekwar is attempting to make
the villagers more interested in their own affairs,
and is putting more and more the control of
small concerns in their hands. Compulsory
education, among other things, had been intro-
duced, and I asked the assembly in front of me

260 THE WEST IN THE EAST

their opinion about it; with the exception of two
elders who seemed unenthusiastic, the others
thought it wise. When I arose to go out, to walk
about in the village, wreaths of flowers were
hung about my neck, two bouquets were pre-
sented to me, and I was given betal leaf and
cardamon seed, which are not bad chewing, by
the way.

I visited the boys' school and the girls' school,
and in both places they were drawn up in line
to sing to me. I was allowed to enter two or
three dwellings, rough square mud huts they
were, with cows, chickens, ducks walking about
in the compound, and all with cakes of cow-dung
drying on the walls and on the ground, this
being their fuel, and consequently a robbery of
the land of its natural fertilizer; but there seems
to be no remedy for this in a land of no natural
fuel.

At the well, which seems to be a sort of vil-
lage meeting-place, like the railway station at
train-time, or a popular corner grocery in a small
New England town, or the Indian trader's store
on one of our Indian reservations, the women
were coming and going, filling their earthen or
brass or bell-metal jars. Each one lets down the
rope, each one draws it up, fills her receptacle,
find walks away balancing her burden on her

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 261

head. It is a picturesque sight, these scenes at
the wells in India, whether it be these face-con-
cealing women with their statuesque poses, or
the men with a pair of oxen letting down and
drawing up the great leather bag and droning
their song, as the oxen pull the rope up and the
bag is emptied into the narrow channels, which
serve as tiny viaducts through the fields.

I have watched these people at the wells in
India by the hour; these people and the soldiers
are the people you like, feel sorry for perhaps,
until you discover that they do not feel sorry for
themselves ; then you realize that you are pump-
ing up the fantastic sympathies of the West
which are not binding here at all, and all too
often artificial even at home, a way of making
the child cry by so much sympathy over his small
bruise that he begins to think it important him-
self. What a lot of that there is, and how the
demagogues of our Western world are making
the children cry over hurts that they did not
even know were painful, until the political boss
discovered that they have a vote value, and the
advertising philanthropist discovered what good
posters they make!

If appearances count for anything, I have
never seen happier people than some of the
Ghurka and Sikh soldiers, and the people in

262 THE WEST IN THE EAST

many of the villages in India. Life is hard, to
be sure, but life everywhere is hard, if it is not
soft, and as for that, I have never seen people
anywhere so unhappy, so little to be envied, as
those who belong to the soft tribe, whether in
India or in New York. I left this little village
of Gora with garlands of flowers around my
neck, with bouquets in my hands, my mouth
full of seeds, attempting to reply to the many
and profound salaams with the courtesy and
dignity they merited.

Another day we were shown His Highness's
jewels. One diamond, a pendant to the great
necklace, is the sixth largest in the world, and
at one time belonged to Napoleon III. There
are three pearls said to be valued at one hun-
dred thousand dollars and a pearl necklace well
known all over the world to those interested in
precious stones. These were merely the choicest
things in a collection comprising sapphires, em-
eralds, rubies, and other jewels. There were
inlaid sword and dagger hilts, and scabbards
incrusted with precious stones, aigrettes that
were showers of diamonds, and richly embroi-
dered coats and mantles.

At the stables we saw the gold and silver gun-
carriages and cannon, which contain each two
hundred and eighty pounds of gold, and which

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 263

are drawn on state occasions by white bullocks,
each of which had its own covering embroidered
with gold and silver, and even silver cases for
their horns.

India has ever hoarded wealth in this form.
In a land where securities are unknown, where
wealth must be easily portable, where there are
no savings-banks and trust companies, the old
methods still survive and prevail, and not one
but many of these princes, and other rich men in
India still count their wealth as most secure
when it is in precious stones, jewelry, and bul-
lion. Even the poor carry in their ears and noses,
on their fingers, toes, arms, and legs, and around
their necks and waists, practically all they pos-
sess of any marketable value. What else can
they do, in a country where there are no doors
to the houses, and no locks and keys, and where
a brass toe-stud, a gun-metal nose-ring, or a thin
silver anklet represent months of saving, and
taken all together comprise the total wealth of
the family. The princes merely do in a big way
what the peasants do in a small way.

Another day was devoted to the college, high-
school, and primary schools, with their dormi-
tories, library of thousands of volumes, play-
grounds, and class-rooms ; and to what interested
me very much, a so-called national school. This

264 THE WEST IN THE EAST

school had some sixty boys who were being
brought up quite apart from the state system and
without state aid. The boys live at the school,
and their teachers are patriotic volunteers who
devote themselves to this work for little or no
recompense. The idea is to bring up the boys in
their own religion, in their own traditions, and to
make and keep them Indian. They are taught
swimming, wrestling, club-swinging, and other
ancient forms of exercise, some of which I saw
in practice. A curious ascetic idealism forms
part of their working creed. They have their
own temple, study their own literature, and are
taught their own history. The head of this
establishment was a gentle-spoken, highly edu-
cated enthusiast, who would have these Indian
youths prepared to work as missionaries to keep
India, India; and the Indians, Indians, instead
of brown Britishers with bowler-hats, bad man-
ners, a tincture of Western knowledge, and hy-
brid patriotism. It was pathetic, but no man
who loves his own can help lending a little love
to the fellow who loves his. It struck me as a
forlorn hope, but I sent a small subscription
when I left. There was no greed, no gain, no
personal ambition in it. Here was a John the
Baptist out in this wilderness, with little more
to work with than he had, and a dream of con-

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 265

verting three hundred miUions to piety and pa-
triotism; who could avoid lending a hand!

Some miles away geographically, but latitudes
away spiritually, was His Highness's wrestling
school. There I found a group of athletes that
opened my eyes to the possibilities of muscular
development in this climate. The Indians as
a whole, except in the north-west, are physically
a feeble folk, whose working days are over at
fifty, and whose women are haggard and un-
lovely at thirty. These wrestlers went through
their exercises for me, and to my surprise I found
the medicine-ball, the sparring-bag, the Indian-
clubs, and the catch-as-catch-can bouts of wrest-
ling of my youth. They also showed me wrest-
ling in the Japanese fashion, with the leg and
arm-breaking holds that we associate with the
Japanese but which, I was assured, were as old
as Buddhism, and must therefore have filtered
into Japan by way of China, Burma, and Korea.
When these wrestlers lined up that I might photo-
graph them, I thought how an American foot-
ball coach's mouth would water at the sight of
such material. If I was surprised, they were
surprised too that I could swing clubs, play with
the medicine-ball, and enjoy a bout of wrestling.
How colossally ignorant we all are of one an-
other!

266 THE WEST IN THE EAST

No other town in India, I believe, has a learned
Indian musician, with an English degree in music,
who conducts a school of native music and de-
votes himself entirely to a revival of the old in-
struments and the old music. Baroda is thus fort-
unate. As a result the musical instruments, and
the music and singing at the entertainment given
for us, were classic. I admit that the music it-
self gave me little pleasure, though one feature
made me see what I had never seen before. An
old, gray-bearded man, accompanied by three
or four instruments, including a small drum, re-
cited a long tale with sobs and shrieks and vio-
lent gestures. There and then I am sure I saw
the bard of Greece. Thus were handed down
the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and this
particular old man was capable of going on for
hours without a break and without hesitation.
But when you have reviewed cavalry at 5.30
A. M. even a Greek bard telling of Achilles is
wearisome after three-quarters of an hour, and
the listener has been out of bed seventeen hours.
Even at more ambitious performances I have
regretted, that the author or translator of Psalm
XCV has made it appear, that "singing," and
"making a joyful noise," are equally pleasing.

Following the music the dancing-girls, one of
them both in face and figure beautiful, gave two

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 267

or three short dances and one long one, the last
being the story of two children kite-flying, a very
popular sport all through the East; one loses her
kite, is in despair; it is recaptured, and so on.
It is a graceful form of pantomime, and might
be given before a Sunday-school. Strange to
say, in these Eastern lands, where nakedness,
or partial nakedness, are universal, the theatri-
cal and terpsichorean performers are clothed
from neck to heel. I have seen much dancing
in India, Korea, and Japan, but it is always the
same as to propriety. Such lascivious and sug-
gestive performances as are given, are for the
benefit of the puritan-bred libertine, whose diet
demands more brutal revelations for its satis-
faction. I suppose it is largely a question of
rice and red meat, and it would be interesting
in this connection to have trustworthy statistics
as to vegetarian morals.

We were honored one afternoon before we
left by an audience with Her Highness, the Ma-
harani, the wife of the Gaekwar. She was the
most beautiful woman I saw in India, and talked
to us of her children and their education in Eng-
land and in America, and broke the rule of re-
ceiving men in her palace when she learned that
I had been at Harvard. She was much inter-
ested in the local schools and hospitals, and the

268 THE WEST IN THE EAST

reforms of her husband, and seemed to be, in
spite of her soft eyes and gentle speech, a master-
ful person with a mind of her own, and far, far
away, from the type of secluded, uneducated
women which is the rule in India. The surprise
of her visit to America had been our women.
She thought them bold and noisy and lacking
in gentleness. Even her evident leaning toward
our many other radical departures in politics
and in society did not pardon, in her estimation,
what seemed to her the vulgar shrillness and
ostentatious independence of our wives and
daughters. As we were leaving she showed me
a mounted tiger she had shot. When I expressed
my admiration, perhaps with a little surprise, she
said: "Oh, you think we Hindu women cannot
be sportsmen!" I knew better than that. He
who knows anything of Indian history knows that
India has had her Joan of Arc, not once, but
many times, and that the Indian women have
sacrificed themselves, not in twos and threes, but
in hecatombs, for their country.

His Highness's Aide, who was unwearying
in his intelligent attentions, and who even pre-
pared us a dinner with his own hands, such as a
Brahman might eat, and sent it over to our bun-
galow, was a type of Indian very puzzling to deal
with, I should think. He was a man of strong

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 269

religious feeling and high ideals, far more thor-
oughly educated than the average Englishman or
American of his years, and revealing what I had
not seen before, but what I saw often before I
left India, a sort of yearning for sympathy for
his own case and that of his people. He too
noted the lack of sympathy with, and the lack of
recognition of, the best class of natives; the re-
fusal of office either civil or military above a cer-
tain grade; the smaller salary paid to the Indian
than to the Englishman holding the same office,
all of which created a sore and sour feeling. He
was only just returned from America, and the
contrasts leave the shadows of sadness upon him
thicker than they are upon other men.

He was, as are all the Indians of his type, mod-
erate in manner, soft of speech, gentle even in in-
dignation. They are pathetic figures, cut off from
opportunity, with no exercise for their real powers,
and feeling that they are only allowed to play
at life, that the real control is in alien hands, and
they chafe at the situation. He was much
amused at the ignorance of India he met with
in America. He mentioned the parochial or-
thodoxy which looked upon him as a heathen
and as a worshipper of idols. The difference be-
tween an educated Brahman and a Hindu peas-
ant, he said, was as great in religious matters as
the difference between the Unitarianism of Chan-

270 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ning and the Catholicism of a Spanish peasant,
and yet both claim to be Christians!

It is Sunday. Two green lizards dart back and
forth on the wall before me. On a tree outside
the window a monkey is watching me with inter-
est and with occasional gestures and waggings of
the head, that might easily be interpreted as indi-
cating contempt for my sedentary occupation,
and an invitation to join him in his brisker and
healthier arboreal athletics. What a difference
between us : I am wondering if my ancestors had
tails, while he is enjoying his. My thoughts are
far away from Baroda, and the lizards and the
monkey.

I see John P. Shorter, who is, let us say, a
stove and hardware merchant in Kansas City.
He has breakfasted on fried beefsteak, fried po-
tatoes, hot bread and coffee, and also fish-balls,
for his wife has a strain of the Brahman blood of
New England in her veins. He has on his un-
comfortable Sunday clothes. His wife is over-
dressed, and wears a hat which has cost a dis-
proportionate amount of the monthly income.
The children look stiffened and starched. Their
clothes and their food, and what will be thrown
away of the latter by the Irish servant-girl, repre-
sent the revenue of a whole Indian village for a
month. They are grumbling at the high cost of
living, and John P. mitigates the cost of his wife's

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 271

hat by denouncing the Trusts. They go to church,
where John P. has a pew in the centre aisle. A
small silver-plated name-plate, with "John P,
Shorter" on it, marks his possession of a pew in
the sanctuary. He knows everybody, everybody
knows him. There are few or no strangers, and
all belong to much the same social stratum as at
a club. There are no poor or friendless or un-
kempt persons present. They would be as out
of place here, as the rabble off the street would
be in the front ranks of a military parade.

This Occidental arrangement for the worship
of God, is financially and socially much the same
arrangement as obtains at a theatre of the better
class. It reminds one of the stranger who joined
in the anthem at a service at Magdalen College,
Oxford. The verger promptly spoke to him and
told him he was not to sing. "This is the house
of God," he replied, "and I am only joining in
the worship." "House of God!" repeated the
agitated verger. "House of God, sir!' Why, this
is Magdalen Chapel!" Should John the Bap-
tist appear at the portals of the Second Church
of Christ in Kansas City, the sexton would be
mortified.

The Second Church is the result of a quarrel
over who should be superintendent of the Sunday-
school in the First Church, and the seceders now

272 THE WEST IN THE EAST

have a church of the same faith, but to them-
selves. The separation has left both the congre-
gations and the revenues of these two bodies, who
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, rather
lean, but the religious rivalry adds piquancy to
the social life of the town, and nobody is offended
apparently, much less shocked, by this open rent
in the garment of charity.

This is Foreign Missions Sunday. John P.
has given each of the children ten cents, and his
wife fifty cents, and has provided himself, in a
convenient pocket, with the amount which he
considers his position in the church and in the
community demands.

Four strikingly and modishly dressed persons,
two men and two women, in a gallery behind the
pulpit, where their latest discoveries in collars,
ties, hats, feathers, and blouses are ostentatiously
and perhaps provocatively displayed, and who
are paid handsome salaries to outdo a similar
quartette in the First Church, and at the same
time to voice John P.'s praise of God for him,
arise, adjust themselves for the inspection of the
audience, and strike up:

"From Greenland's icy mountains
From India's coral strand

They call us to deliver

Their land from error's chain."

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 273

They go on to proclaim further, do these ladies
in corsets, in open-work blouses, and wearing
high heels, false curls and ear-rings, and gold in
their teeth, that:

"The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone,"

and later ask with due emphasis the question :

"Shall we whose souls are lighted
By wisdom from on high, —
Shall we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny ?"

John P. rises, sets his glasses on his nose, and
follows the words in his hymn-book. Mrs. John
P. inspects the fashions in the choir and about
her, and by a natural concatenation of thoughts
drifts away to that alley- way in the Waldorf Ho-
tel where she saw, on her one visit there, sartorial
visions that have never been forgotten. After
this full-throated invitation to Greenland, and to
India, and to Ceylon, voiced mainly by the quar-
tette of hirelings, to come into the fold and be like
Mr. and Mrs. John P., the missionary pleader is
presented to "my people" by "our beloved pas-
tor," whose salary, by the way, is two months in
arrears.

I may appear, way out here in Baroda, to that
monkey in the tree to be looking at him, but I am

274 THE WEST IN THE EAST

not. I see that preacher as though I were seated
in the Second Church m Kansas City. I hear
his exaggerated accounts of the work done, and
its ever- increasing success. I hear the anecdotes
picked for the occasion, of misery and want, and
a longing for better things a la John P. Shorter;
of the rich rulers "bowing down to wood and
stone," men of many wives and many pleasures,
while the peasants are bowed down and bent,
and burnt brown with the toil and heat.

I have described something of the actual situa-
tion here where I am a guest. Only yesterday
afternoon I saw a Muhammadan standing at sun-
set on a block of stone on which he had placed
his carpet, in a busy street filled with Hindus
coming and going, saying his prayers and making
repeated obeisance toward Mecca. His religion
is not only different, but antagonistic to the creed
and the customs of the Hindus, but in Baroda the
Gaekwar, a Hindu himself, imposes absolute re-
ligious tolerance. I ask myself what would hap-
pen if mass were said daily in the open street in
Kansas City.

The missionary in his frock-coat and white tie
gets hotter and hotter in this furnace-heated at-
mosphere — the furnace man is a negro. John
P., despite his too heavy breakfast of fried beef,
smiles benignly as he hears that the cow is sacred

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 275

in India, and almost winks at the superintendent
of the stock yards whose pew is across the aisle.
Mrs. John P., somewhat anaemic, for the climate
is trying in Kansas City, is glad she married
John P., as she listens to the account of the posi-
tion of women in India. As for me, I shiver to
think what the consensus of the competent,
granting even that they are a jury of Christians,
would say if they were called upon to decide
between John P. and the Maharaja Gaekwar of
Baroda. If there is any such heaven as John P.
sings about, and hears preached about, when he
gets there he will be surprised to find how bright
is the halo, how tuneful the harp, and how el-
evated the position of some of these heathen
princes, for whose conversion he, John P. Shorter,
of the Second Church of Christ, in Kansas City,
has condescendingly contributed one dollar!

I know of no place in the world so far away
from New York as Udaipur. Udaipur is the cap-
ital of the native State of Mewar, ruled over by
His Highness, the Maharana Dhiraj Sir Fateh
Singh, G. C. S. I., and has some twelve thousand
square miles of territory, a population of a little
more than one million, and revenues of about six
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Its ruler is
the premier prince, and the proudest, in all India.
His authentic ancestry reaches back two thou-

276 THE WEST IN THE EAST

sand years, and stretches on beyond that in
Indian mythology, to the progenitor of the solar
race, the deified hero Rama. This prince bears
to the world of Hinduism a relation unique either
in the East or the West. He is part Pope, part
High Priest, part King. He may even interfere
with Brahmanical excommunication ; and at his
death, men who would die rather than submit
to an insult to their beards, shave their faces
clean.

There is no suspicion of representative govern-
ment, no dreams even of the rights of man, no
complications of electricity, or steam, or compul-
sory education, no politics, no fantastic hygiene,
no patent foods, no fear of microbes, no fashions
or etiquette of a date later than 728 A. D., when
the history of the present State under the present
family began by the taking of the fortress of Chi-
tor by Bappa; no newspapers, no news, except
the lazy gossip of the bazaars; no hurry except
when news is brought from one of the stations in
the hills, where men are kept day and night the
year round for this purpose, that a black panther
or a tiger has been seen, then the Maharana and a
retinue hasten away; no daily excitement about
an earthquake in Japan, a revolution in Portugal,
a change of government in England, a panic in
New York, a strike in Paris, or a rhetorical out-

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 277

burst in Berlin; no jealousy of other countries, no
envy of progress elsewhere. Why should there
be, since their ruler is little less than a god to hun-
dreds of millions of Hindus, and to criticise his
home, his habits, and his decrees is unthinkable.
Therefore I repeat Udaipur is farther from the
Bowery than any other place in the world.

It was a happy accident of travel that our next
visit after that to Baroda was to this prince, who
will have nothing to do with modern inventions
whether of mind or matter.

We left the guest house at Baroda to take a
train leaving at 5.18 a. m. The train was late and
we drove back to wait. We returned to the sta-
tion an hour and a half later; the train was still
late, and we finally got away three hours and a
half after getting out of bed, and twenty-nine
hours of continuous railway travel brought us to
Udaipur. This is one example, there were
many, though I shall not cite them, which bids
me again warn travellers who lack enthusiasm, a
stout heart, and a strong constitution, and the
best of introductions, that a visit to India may
prove as disappointing to them as it was delight-
ful to us.

Udaipur is worth all the fatigue of getting
there. We were driven to a large stone bunga-
low, of which we were the sole occupants. A

278 THE WEST IN THE EAST

splendid old fellow, gray-bearded, with medals
on his breast and a hunting-knife in his belt,
greeted us at the entrance, and put himself and
the household at our service. The food, the
wines, the tobacco, and the service are of the best,
and hearing me complain of lack of exercise, the
steward provides me with a pony for a ride before
breakfast each morning. At each meal he stands
in the dining-room, with an eye to everything, and
from morning till night he watches over our com-
fort as though we were his children.

In the afternoon we are driven to the lake,
where we take a boat and are rowed to its south-
ern end. We walk up a path to find ourselves on
a high terrace looking down upon a dusty plain
where hundreds of wild pigs are grunting, squeal-
ing, quarrelling as they are fed. Here we make
our bow to our host. He had just come in from
a panther hunt. Every afternoon when he is at
home he is present at the feeding of these wild
boars. He was standing with a circle of his cour-
tiers behind him, and a mediseval-looking figure
he was, a sword in his left hand, a long hunting-
knife in his belt, and those about him all in hunt-
ing tunics and boots. He was a slender, wiry-
looking man of about sixty, well preserved and
athletic, with nothing of the pallid hue of the
puzzled thinker in his look, and a deep scar

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 279

over his right eye due to a fall from his horse
while pig-sticking.

We bowed and shook hands, and through the
interpreter I thanked him for his hospitality to us.
I was somewhat taken aback when the interpre-
ter repeated: "His Highness says you have no
hospitality to thank him for since you have only
just arrived." This seemed an attempt to put
me on my mettle, so I turned and pointed to the
lake with its marble palaces, and to the gleaming
white towers of the huge palace overhanging the
lake, and said: "Tell His Highness that one
glimpse of this is a thousand years of hospitality."
We had some further talk about horses and hunt-
ing and then turned to go. As we were leaving,
one of the suite came after us, and we returned,
when the interpreter was bidden to tell me that
His Highness hoped I would enjoy my stay, that
I was to stay as long as I liked, and that he, the
interpreter, was commanded to see to it that we
had everything we wanted.

He is a conservative of the conservatives, this
prince. He speaks no English, lives his own life,
never leaves India, will have nothing to do with
the new-fangled notions of the day, is an enthusi-
astic hunter of big game, has killed fifty tigers, be-
sides panthers and other game, and has never
been photographed while doing it, and is simple

280 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and dignified in his demeanor. There was an
atmosphere of far-off, by-gone times on the ter-
race that afternoon. It was as though I had
dreamed myself back into the Middle Ages. He
and his customs and habits and opinions are
passing away, leaving him a lonely figure in a
fussy world, but he remains unmoved, unchanged,
disdainful. Now as I look back and remember
India, he stands out easily as the first gentleman
there, and upon the whole the most impressive
figure I saw in all the East.

When he heard that at the great Durbar, the
Viceroy was to ride in front, and on the elephant
beside him was to ride a woman, his wife, he
declined to ride behind a woman, and sent his
elephant, gorgeously caparisoned, but with an
empty howdah. In these days when every man
is either nursing or courting a constituency of
some sort; when books are written, and news-
papers are printed, and speeches are made, and
sermons are preached ever with an eye to circu-
lation or popularity; when weighing down the
words and thoughts of every man's brain, except
the tiniest minority, is the dull dead weight of
its possible effect upon a selfish and superficial
mediocrity; when both men and women trim
their sails shiveringly at the bare thought of being
blacklisted socially or politically or morally, it is

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 281

refreshing, it is even awesome, to meet a man
whose only constituency is his own soul ! I am
not sure that we may not take steps backward
toward Udaipur ere long, before we take many
more along the path we are following. We may
have better sewers, but I doubt if we have
more moral courage, for it takes some moral
courage to stand up to the empire which governs
one in every five of the human race, and more
than one in every five square miles of the habita-
ble globe, and to stand alone. But the British
like this man far better, I make no doubt, than
those, whether from India or from any other
country, who bend to them, agree with them,
flatter them, and who mutilate their pride to
become eunuchs of patriotism, whose capital is
Paris, and whose creed is cosmopolitanism.

As we were rowed back the length of the lake,
the sun was going down, leaving a great curtain
of dark purple as a background for the palace.
This building stands on the crest of a ridge run-
ning parallel to the lake, and a hundred feet above
it, its granite and marble are all of one whiteness,
and with this royal background it looked like a
palace of alabaster with carved turrets of old
ivory. There is only one other picture, in India,
the Taj, which bears comparison with this lake
and its surroundings.

282 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The city, of some fifty thousand inhabitants, is
entirely surrounded by a bastioned wall, and the
palaces old and new within make a town of them-
selves. On the great terrace running the length
of the old palace, where the Maharana still keeps
his own apartments, there is room to parade the
whole army, cavalry, elephants, and all. From his
windows this mediaeval prince can look out into
this colossal court-yard, where he insists upon
the old ways, and so we saw the afternoon we
were there, as you may see any other afternoon,
bullocks, pigeons, chickens, elephants, camels,
geese, all sunning themselves in lazy contentment.
As we drove out of the palace, a magnate of this
small kingdom rode in, mounted on a fine horse,
the saddle and stirrup-straps of red velvet, and
the bridle and reins of some red stuff as well. He
himself was in brilliant-colored garments, a sword
by his side, pistols in his belt, and there followed
and surrounded him a retinue of fifty or more,
mounted or on foot, with runners on ahead to
clear the way for them through the crowded
streets.

These were delicious days we spent roaming
over the palaces and gardens, in and out of the
temples, and through the sunny streets of Udai-
pur. The only sad spot in the picture was our
reception by the son and heir in his apartments.

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 283

He is a cripple, shrunken and thin, but with pleas-
ant manners, a pathetic smile, and a little Eng-
lish at his command. He was surrounded by
the officers of his household, who looked stalwart
indeed beside him, and it was evidently a real
pleasure to him, as it was probably a rare one, to
receive strangers.

I remember particularly the garden palace
so-called, which forms a part of the old palace,
and is a hanging garden, filled with flowers and
ferns, and palms and fountains, and with exqui-
sitely carved pillars, and marble walls and floors
all perched on a part of the flat roof; the wonder-
ful carving of the marble around doors and win-
dows ; the garden of the court ladies, surrounded
by a high wall, with a great marble swimming-
bath in the centre and filled with flowers and
shrubs; the Hindu temple of Jagannath with an
elephant on each side of the long flight of marble
steps leading up to it, and every inch of it carved ;
the great gateways of the city, the Elephant gate,
the Delhi gate, the Moon gate; the cenotaphs
of the royal family for generations back, en-
closed by a high wall and with many fine trees,
and on more than one of these tombs mention
of the number of the wives who burned them-
selves when their masters died; the groups on
foot or on horseback, of the bewhiskered gen-

284 THE WEST IN THE EAST

try, for even in a land where the beard is
everywhere a mark of manly dignity, the Raj-
put is conspicuous for his care of his beard, and
by tying a scarf around his head and neck he
curls out the ends of his whiskers, till sometimes
they are twisted over behind his ears, lending him
a dashing appearance, which his soldierly bear-
ing emphasizes ; the startling appearance of gen-
tlemen in the process of dying their beards black
with henna, for during the interim their beards
are a bright orange color, which gives a particu-
larly fierce frame for the dark faces and eyes;
and then the return to our own little palace with
its superb view of lakes and hills, and our cosey
dinners by candle-light, with the steward watch-
ing with jealous eye every movement of the bare-
footed and turbaned servants who attended us;
and well I remember one morning the shrieks
and cries in our court-yard when the steward,
well over the age when most men enjoy a bout at
fisticuffs, was seen giving a sound beating to a
rapscallion who had maltreated the buffalo that
brought us the skins full of water for our baths.
Where could a man go for a holiday where he
would escape more completely from modernity,
and be able to look out of a casement set in the
Middle Ages and see his own environment in per-
spective; where better than to Udaipur as the

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 285

guest of the Maharana ? The setting is there in
these bewilderingly beautiful surroundings, and
surely the prince is there as a seal to stamp it as
genuine. He is a direct descendant of the Raj-
puts of Chitor. They were conquered by the
Mughals as were the other Rajput clans, but they
fled and found shelter among the mountains and
deserts of the Indus, and, unlike the others, re-
fused to mingle their high-caste Hindu blood even
with that of a Muhammadan emperor. They
still boast that they alone among the great Raj-
put clans have never given a daughter in mar-
riage to a Mughal emperor. Their motto is a
fine one: "Who steadfast keeps the faith, him
the Creator keeps." Certainly the present ruler
is putting it to the test. Long life and success
to him, say I!

The Maharana's hospitality guarded us even
when we had left his capital. Four hours by
train brought us to Chitorgah. There at the sta-
tion an elephant and a tonga, a kind of two-
wheeled cart drawn by ponies, awaited us and we
were taken to see the citadel city where this fam-
ily have ruled and fought ever since the begin-
ning of the eighth century. On a rocky hill over
five hundred feet high is the great fort over three
miles in length. In the old tumultuous days the
capital city of Mewar was Chitor, situated in this

286 THE WEST IN THE EAST

fort. On one occasion, after a siege in which
eleven royal princes were killed, all the women
entered an underground cave, and were there
burned to death, and as the smoke and flames
arose the men rushed out to throw themselves
upon the swords of their Muhammadan enemies.

The whole of the enclosure at the top is covered
with the ruins of palaces and temples. The two
towers of Fame and Victory, the one eighty feet
high, the other in nine stories and one hundred
and thirty feet high, are still well preserved. This
so-called fortress could stow away the hill of the
Acropolis in one corner and the Roman Forum
in another, and impresses you with the magnifi-
cent scale upon which these people carried out
their building operations. How this place was
ever captured, with its sides of sheer rock reach-
ing up five hundred feet from the plain below,
and crowned by walls so thick that one may
drive along the tops of them, and this before the
days of cannon, is a mystery, a mystery even to
one who has seen Quebec and knows its story.

When we arrived at the station at Chitorgah,
the carriage was detached from the train and left
on a siding. When we returned to it from the
excursion to the fort, we found a kitchen estab-
lished outside the carriage door, with pots and
pans and dishes and charcoal fires, and a dinner

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 287

of several courses was there and then prepared
and handed in to us. I was asked to sign a
"chit" or voucher for it, for the Maharana's
treasurer, but that I refused to do. It was Raj-
put gallantry indeed to extend hospitality to
guests so long as they remained in Rajput terri-
tory, but we drank His Highness's health instead
in our own brew, and at eleven o'clock the car-
riage was attached to another train and we were
off; with an abiding assurance that our Indian
hosts, so far, had nothing to learn in the West of
fine manners and generous hospitality.

VII

BUNIA— PANI

IT would be easy to spend a year in India, and
never hear the words Bunia or Pani. As a
guest of affable officials, of native princes;
as a visitor to Delhi, Agra, Benares, Amritsar,
the ruins of Akbar's great city of Fatehpur-Sikri,
to Bombay, Lucknow, and Calcutta, one may
hear nothing of Bunia and Pani. At manoeuvres
with the army, at the great meeting of the con-
tingents of Imperial Service troops, when we
were all the guests of Her Highness the Begum
of Bhopal ; shooting or pig-sticking with Indian
or British potentates, you hear nothing of Bunia
or Pani. You might come away from India
thinking that the Viceroy and his brilliant con-
sort drove about in splendid equipages with out-
riders, postilions, and a mounted body-guard;
that the governors of Bombay, and Madras did
the same on a smaller scale; that the military
and civilian officials were interested mainly in
sport, and in making themselves comfortable.
As a matter of fact, each and every one of

288

BUNIA — PANI 289

these people, from His Excellency the Viceroy
down to the last recruit to the civil service, is
thinking of Bunia and Pani. And well they
may, for Bunia and Pani are the two great
problems in India.

You must tear away the magnificence and the
rags ; the Imperial etiquette and the splendor of
the native princes; you must stop your ears to
political and parliamentary discussion ; you must
forget the polite European essayist who writes
of his holiday in India, and likewise the bitter
fulminations of the yeastily educated native jour-
nalist; and you must study Bunia and Pani,
otherwise you leave India as ignorant as when
you first looked at a map of that vast continent.

Pani means water. Bunia is the name for the
local shopkeeper, grain merchant, and money-
lender.

Great Britain has invested capital in India for
its commercial and industrial development, in-
cluding the employment of its people, to the
amount of $1,750,000,000. One-tenth of the en-
tire trade of the British Empire passes through
the seaports of India, and this sea-borne trade is
more than one-third of the trade of the empire
outside of the United Kingdom. India is the
largest producer of food and raw material in
the Empire, and the principal granary of Great

290 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Britain. The imports into the United Kingdom
of wheat, meal, and flour from India exceed those
of Canada and are double those of Australia.

It is said that the hoarded wealth of India,
buried in the ground, stored in the treasure-
houses of the native princes, and in the jew-
elry and precious stones of the Indian men
and women, small and great, amounts to
$1,800,000,000.

Aside from the strategical importance, what
would the British Empire be without India, and
what would India be if it were not that the Vice-
roy and the 10,000 Europeans and the 1,500,000
Indian government employees under him keep
Bunia and Pani forever in mind!

These 300,000,000 in India are agriculturists.
Water for their fields means food and comfort;
the lack of it means, fever, plague, and famine.
And when fever, and plague, and famine come
in India, they do not take a few score, or a few
hundreds, or even thousands; they kiU millions.
In 1877 the famines in southern India alone
swept away over five millions of people; and a
few years ago, in the Punjab, over two millions.

When we hear of a drought, we think of it in a
hazy way, as an inconvenience connected with
the laundry, the bath-room, or the garden; or at
the worst a mill here or there must stop work for

BUNIA — PANI 291

a week or two. But what if it meant death by
starvation of numbers equal to the whole popu-
lation of Greater New York, or of the population
of the whole Western division of States, or of all
New England, in a few months! That is what
it means in India. How little we know of the
institutions, the codes, the religions, the obser-
vances, the problems, the troubles of other peo-
ples and of other lands; and worse, how little we
care even when we are undertaking to teach and
to govern them!

"When Mazarvan the Magician

Journeyed Westward through Cathay,
Nothing heard he but the praises
Of Badoura on his way.

"But the lessening rumor ended
When he came to Khaledan,
There the folk were talking only
Of Prince Camaralzaman.

"So it happens with the poets;
Every province hath its own,
Camaralzaman is famous.
Where Badoura is unknown."

The experience of Mazarvan the Magician
is the experience of every other intelligent trav-
eller. It was with eagerness therefore that I ac-
cepted the opportunity to see Pani and Bunia at
close quarters where "the folk were talking only"
of them.

292 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The deputy-commissioner of a certain district
in the Punjab was my host. He was about to
make a tour of inspection. The Punjab has an
area of 134,000 square miles and a population of
25,000,000. Seven-eighths of this total popula-
tion live in 33,000 villages with an average popu-
lation of about 500. Half of the population are
Muhammadans; 6,000,000 are Hindus; 5,000,-
000 of them are Jats, and these Jats are half
of them Muhammadan, a fourth Hindu, and a
million Sikh Jats, and they own half the land in
the Punjab. Jat is the name given to the de-
scendants of the Scythians who settled in India,
and whose first great king was Kanishka.

The Punjab is divided into twenty-nine dis-
tricts each in charge of a deputy commissioner or
collector; and these again are grouped into five
divisions each under a commissioner. Each of
these districts has its district board presided over
by the deputy-commissioner, who is also a mag-
istrate and collector of the district. There are
some 1,500 members of these boards, of whom
600 are elected. They are responsible for local
matters, roads, schools, bridges, hospitals, dis-
pensaries. In the large towns there are munic-
ipal committees, and of the 1,500 members
nearly 1,200 are non-ofiicials, and they control
and spend over $2,000,000 per annum. I cite

BUNIA — PANI 293

these facts not to bewilder the reader with details,
but to show how the British Government strives
to encourage the people in managing their own
affairs. In the larger towns the members of
these committees show some interest; but the
members of the provincial committees take little
interest, there is next to no discussion, and the
European official chairman does the bulk of the
work.

The commissioner is under the control of the
financial commissioner, who, under the lieuten-
ant-governor of the Punjab, is the head of the
revenue administration. The lieutenant-gov-
ernor is the right hand of the Viceroy in the Pun-
jab. Each district with its deputy-commissioner
is divided into minor divisions called Tahsils, and
a Tahsil as a rule contains two to four hundred
villages, and a village may contain fifty huts,
built of mud, and thatched with grass, and gene-
rally containing one room, with sometimes a
space enclosed with mud walls, where household
duties are performed, where odds and ends are
stored, and where the bullock or bullocks are
tethered at night.

It is a long way from the Viceregal Lodge, and
the Viceroy, at Calcutta, to this hut and its occu-
pants in the Punjab, but they are closely con-
nected, as we shall see, and it is one of the glories

294 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of the British administration in India that this
connection exists and is maintained. If the family
in that hut in the Punjab is stricken with fever, or
if the plague stalks in among them, the headman
of the village goes to the dispensary, the official
there reports to Delhi, Delhi reports to Lahore,
and the lieutenant-governor there, to Calcutta,
Almost before the relatives of that family know
what has happened, they know in Calcutta ; and
the machinery, with its net-work of living wires
which spreads over India like a vast cobweb, is
put in motion to relieve that family in the hut in
a village that few white people ever see.

The deputy-commissioner, his young assistant,
and I rode out of Delhi early one morning on our
way to the first camp. We were not many miles
from Delhi when three men met us on the road.
Each held in his hand a rupee, which he offered
to the deputy-commissioner with a profound
salaam; this was touched and remitted, this be-
ing the old sign of allegiance. Thus the feuda-
tories of the great Mughals showed their allegi-
ance to the Emperor; thus the great native chiefs
to-day offer a gold piece to the Viceroy, or to the
governor of the province to which they belong;
thus the headmen of these villages through which
we passed made known their loyalty to the great
British Raj, represented here and now by the

BUNIA — PANI 295

deputy-commissioner. Then begins a rapid, and
sometimes excited, conversation as the represent-
atives of the village walk beside us. The official
replies fluently in the native's own tongue, and
the expression on the faces shows their confid-
ence in his self-control, patience, and experience.
They know little, and care less, about legisla-
tion, but this method of dealing with their affairs
they both understand and enjoy.

It is of the affairs and condition of their village
that they talk. One complains that the cattle
from a neighboring village stray into the fields
and destroy the crops; another that three hun-
dred of his village have died of the plague, and
there are not enough laborers left to cultivate
the soil and pay the taxes ; another asks that the
irrigation canal be brought nearer to his village;
another retails how the hail has spoilt the crops ;
another that the white ants have destroyed the
wheat; another that members of the Arya-Somaj
are preaching sedition among the villagers; one,
and what a relief his tale must have been to my
long-suffering host, says that the taxes of his
village are all paid, and that they are quite
happy, as long as they have peace and safety
"under the shadow of the Protector of the Poor."

The deputy-commissioner is as patient and
polite to them as he is to me, when after leaving

296 THE WEST IN THE EAST

one after another of these groups, I begin a rapid
fire of questions. Every now and again he de-
cides to see for himself the situation in this or that
village, and we set off at a brisk canter, leaving
the main road to make for the village in question.
They are all much the same, though differing in
population. Fifty or more mud huts, with the
refuse stored in the compound of each, which is
intended for manure, or fuel ; and the interior of
the hut cleaner than I expected, for the walls and
floors are covered with a mixture of mud and cow
dung, which seems to be a cleanly, as it is a favorite
form of whitewashing, since I saw it also used in
the cavalry lines in many parts of India. Near
the village is the so-called pond, a shallow place
filled with stagnant water in which pigs, ducks,
geese, cattle, and mosquitoes share and share
alike. There are the village wells, some for high-
caste, some for low-caste people; the village
temple with its sacred tree, the peepul tree, is
there; the council tree also, under which the
leaders of public opinion smoke their pipes of
an evening; there are the shops in the principal
street with the proprietor squatting beside his
open bags of salt, sweetmeats, grains and spices,
these latter covered with flies and hornets and
wasps; another sells brass and iron and bell-
metal cooking utensils and water- jars; there are

BUNIA — PANI 297

the potters, and I see for the first time, and
understand, the Bible's potter's thumb and pot-
ter's wheel.

"For I remember stopping by the way
To watch the potter thumping his wet clay;

And with its all-obliterated tongue
It murmured — Gently, Brother, gently pray! "

I see the wheelwright building those awkward-
looking carts which I have admired and won-
dered at as they bumped their way unbroken
over awful roads. They are made of wood, bam-
boo, and string. They can give at every joint.
That is the secret of their resistance. I see the
shed where the children are taught ; and in a few
of the villages they are crushing the sugar-cane,
boiling sugar, and doing well with the sale of it,
coarse as it is. It is needless to say that the
streets are not paved, and you walk ankle-deep
in mud or dust; and goats, water-buffaloes, and
sacred bulls have the same privileges, the sa-
cred bulls rather more, than you. None of the
dogs seems to have owners, each is out for him-
self and the devil take the hindermost; and at
night they and the jackals sing rival choruses.
The men and children follow you about sol-
emnly curious; the women, with bare legs and
arms and shoulders, cover their faces as you pass,
not as we think from modesty wholly, but be-

298 THE WEST IN THE EAST

cause it is considered an impertinence to look at
us boldly. One or two of the houses are more
pretentious; they have two stories, a tiled roof,
and a court-yard, and the proprietor owns bul-
locks and even a pony. This is the home of the
Bunia. He buys, and sells, and lends money.
He is the Hindu Shylock.

A Hindu will spend a year's income on a mar-
riage feast for his daughter. It is one of the
Hindu social laws obeyed among them, as are
similar laws among us, with toil, sacrifice, and ex-
travagance; and with far more attention to de-
tail than the moral law or the behests of religion.
It is then that the native mortgages his fields, his
crops, his everything, to provide a feast suitable
to what he considers his station. He buys whis-
tles just as we do, that we do not want, that do not
whistle, or that give forth false and discordant
notes; because his little social world has made it
the fashion. He could live very well, just as we
could, if we only bought what we liked, and what
we needed, but Heera Lall goes bankrupt, just
as Mr. Climber and Mr. Splurge do, buying what
they do not want in the way of whistles, to play
tunes that nobody cares particularly to hear.

Then the Bunia lends at twenty and fifty per
cent and even more. The crops do not even
pay the interest, let alone the taxes; and Heera

BUNIA — PANI 299

Lall is soon in the hands of the Jews, and labors
from sunrise till sunset on the land which is no
longer his. In years of poor crops, or when the
peasant is sick or otherwise incapacitated, again
the Bunia appears, not only as a lender, but
tempting him to buy on credit.

A parental government has stepped in to pro-
tect the small land-owners; there are 3,000,000
of them here in the Punjab alone. The new Land
Alienation Act provides that no mortgage can be
given for more than fifteen years, and the money-
lender is not allowed to purchase except by per-
mission. Sales are only allowed between agri-
culturists, or where by the sale of part the whole
is redeemed. Taxes are often remitted in years
of bad crops, in whole or in part; and the gov-
ernment lends money, at a low rate of interest,
to poor communities to buy seed or cattle. This
law for the protection of these helpless agricult-
urists, and there are 250,000,000 of them here in
India, was bitterly opposed by native babus,
lawyers, money-lenders, and the leaders in the
movement for representative government. Peace
and quiet and prosperity have made land valua-
ble in India; hence the intriguing to get pos-
session of it. We know something of the land
shark in America ; one needs little imagination to
picture what would happen if he had his way in

300 THE WEST IN THE EAST

India. In a few years the land would be in the
hands of a few, and the rest would be serfs. The
government that brought Pani to India's fields,
and a strong hand to control India's Bunias,
brought salvation.

No man has the smallest right to pronounce
an opinion upon British rule in India, until he
has seen the water trickling painfully through its
fields, and the Bunia straining at the tether that
keeps him in check. Here is the real problem,
other matters are froth compared to it.

It is bewildering to find that there is a society
in America which, with words and money, en-
deavors to upset the British rule in India; more
bewildering still to find members of this society
in America, and labor leaders in England, taking
sides in India with the blood-sucking Bunia and
the agitators who support him. Nothing but
dense ignorance can explain it, unless it be that
morbid craving for notoriety which leads the critic
to rush into any convenient dusty room, waving
a cloth about his head, careless of what becomes
of the dust, so long as he occupies the centre of
the room. Many rooms are dusty in all our civ-
ilizations, and the only way to clean them is with
a damp cloth, and quietly, and a little at a time.
But the demagogue, and the agitator, scoff at
such methods ; first because such methods call for

BUNIA — PANI 301

work, and care, and study; and secondly because
such work must be done quietly. What does
Cleon care for such a job as that! Let there be
strikes in England, famine and bloodshed in
India, panics and excitement, and distress, in
America, so long as Cleon occupies the centre
of the stage for a brief moment, enjoying that
delicious notoriety to which all else is sub-
ordinated.

We have ridden fifteen or twenty miles. It is
getting hot and dusty, when we see the glimmer
of tents, the smoke of fires, groups of camels, and
attendants and servants, and we have reached
camp. My tent measures thirty feet by twenty;
it is carpeted with rugs, has a dressing-room with
tub, wash-stand, and other necessaries. There is
a writing-table and an easy chair. Your clothes
are laid out, the hot bath is ready; and shaved,
and bathed, and in light clothes, you are ready
for breakfast.

There is a mess-tent, the deputy-commissioner's
office-tent and living-tent, the assistant's tent,
and all is ready even to the pencils, pens, and
blotters arranged on the office table. After
breakfast the deputy-commissioner retires to his
office, and one after another, singly and in groups,
citizens and village officials appear with their
troubles, complaints, disputes, and business.

302 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Hour after hour he listens, questions, decides,
and patches up differences.

Court is held out here as in Delhi. A pictu-
resque group, witnesses, prisoners, attorneys,
police are squatting, or standing, around the door
of the assistant's tent; and for two hours or more
he deals with a case of the theft of clothes from
one woman by another. The clothes of the
whole party would scarcely bring a dollar at
auction, I should guess; but here as in Bombay,
or in Calcutta, justice holds sway, and the low-
liest may claim and receive protection.

After five hours' work or more, we are off on
our ponies, led by some of the sportsmen of the
village, and one evening we returned with a bag
which included duck, hare, rabbits, a species of
Indian grouse, and a deer. We dress and dine,
and dine well, and after a chat and a smoke, to
bed. The sounds are strange; the gurgling of
the loose-lipped camels, the cries of the jackals
and yelping of the pariah dogs, the raucous cry
of the peacocks, the chattering of monkeys and
perroquets; then for a time the noise and bustle
of loading protesting camels and getting under
way.

There is a duplicate set of tents, and each
night at about eleven all but our sleeping-tents,
and the bare necessities of the morning toilet.

BUNIA — PANI 303

are loaded on the camels and set off for another
camp ; those we leave behind in the morning go
on, not to the next camp, but to the camp after
that, so that each day, after our three or four
hours' ride, we find the camp set and ready for
us, and litigants, questioners, quarrellers, and
many who come merely to pay their respects,
warned beforehand of our coming, are there,
waiting the arrival of the "Protector of the Poor,"
as my host is often called, and as he is, for that
I can vouch from daily personal observation.

At one of these camps there appears Rai
Bahadur, a title conferred upon him by govern-
ment, Chandri Rughnath Singh. He is what
might be called a country gentleman in a small
way. He owns land, he is a magistrate of the
second class, and he is the head and representa-
tive of a certain group of villages and is called a
Zaildar. At the request of the deputy-commis-
sioner he shows me nearly a dozen medals and
one order given to his grandfather, his father,
and to himself for meritorious services as soldiers
in the native army. There is a mutiny medal
and two medals for services with Lord Roberts
among them. I was glad to meet him. He is
the other side of the shield, and poles apart from
the restless and discontented Bengali. He is a
stanch believer in British rule, has fought as a

304 THE WEST IN THE EAST

soldier, and now works as a good citizen, bearing
his share of the common burden, modest, unas-
suming, and eflScient. He accompanies us part
way on our next day's journey, and is evidently
as respected by the natives we meet as he is by
my host.

This title of Zaildar leads to an explanation.
The unit of the revenue administration in India
is the estate or Mahal which is usually identical
with the village or Mauza. Each district is di-
vided into several Tahsils and a Tahsil includes
from two to four hundred of these villages. Each
Tahsil has a separate land revenue assessment.
Each village is represented by one or more head-
men or Lambardars. The villages again are
grouped together into Zails, by bonds of histori-
cal or tribal associations, or common interests,
and these Zails are represented by a Zaildar, ap-
pointed by the deputy-commissioner, from among
the headmen of the different villages. Each vil-
lage too has its Patwari or village accountant, we
should call him the town clerk, who keeps the
books for revenue purposes. He records mort-
gages, keeps the record of the land-owners, of
changes of ownership, of assessments and of
boundaries, and other matters pertaining to his
office. Thus there is a chain from each little vil-
lage and from each dweller therein, up to the

BUNIA — PANI 305

financial commissioner himself. It is an admi-
rable system, adopted from the Mughal emperors
by the British, with changes and improvements,
and kept going by these deputy-commissioners
and their assistants, and at the same time checked
by them by the method I am now seeing, of
travelling through the country and keeping in
touch with the people themselves. Whatever
else may happen, these few officials must keep
themselves fit for their arduous and never-ending
duties. Seldom do they ask for or receive an
Aegrotat; and as a body they seem to take it for
granted that they will receive little praise and
less recognition for their services; and yet no
body of men in the British Empire is doing so
much to keep their empire together and in peace.

Besides the revenue tax, each headman gets
five per cent for collecting from his vUlage, and
also eight and one-fourth per cent is set aside for
various village needs. Not only do these land
revenue methods keep the people constantly in
touch with the officials, but in addition there
are the schools, the police, the medical depart-
ments, all again with representatives in every
village, so that the smallest and most far-away
community is cared for.

Although each of these small proprietors, there
are 3,000,000 of them here in the Punjab, owns

306 THE WEST IN THE EAST

his land, he owns it only as the tenant. The
landlord in the old days was the Mughal Em-
peror, and in these, is the British King-Emperor.
A share of the profits from the land belongs to
the ruler, by the traditions of centuries. The
total revenue of India is roughly $240,000,000.
Of this $91,000,000 are raised by taxation which
includes an excise tax on salt, spirituous liquors,
and drugs, and a customs duty averaging about
five per cent; about $46,000,000 from state
profits; and $100,000,000 from revenue from the
state's share in the land. The taxation is less
than forty-four cents per head of the population,
and even when the land revenue, which as we
have seen is really rent, is included, it is less
than seventy-eight cents. The system of self-
government in these villages and towns has
been pushed as far as can be with due regard
to efficiency. There are 750 municipalities in
India which administer the affairs of 17,000,000
people, and of the 10,000 official members 8,700
are natives, and they dispense an income of over
$30,000,000. There are 1,100 local boards,
charged with the care of village education, sanita-
tion, roads, and other civil works, which dispense
$20,000,000 a year; and of these an even larger
proportion of the members are natives. The de-
mands of the state for its share of the profits of

BUNIA — PANI 307

the land are revised at recurring periods of from
ten to thirty years. In Bengal alone the demand
of the state was fixed in perpetuity by Lord
Cornwallis in 1793. The state has lost millions
in consequence. British improvements have in-
creased both the value of the lands and of the
crops, but only the proprietors profit.

These are dry bones, these figures, but the
reader who has a dim notion that India to-day is
governed by a little knot of Englishmen must be
told to what a very large extent these English-
men have turned over the responsibilities of gov-
ernment to the Indians themselves, and at what
small cost per head of population this govern-
mental machinery is run.

During the hours when my host is at work in
his ofiice tent, I prowl about in the neighboring
villages, talking to school-masters, town-clerks,
shopkeepers, and the laborers in the fields. In
one village the Patwari or town-clerk shows me
his books, his maps of the village lands, and we
walk over to a certain field, and he points out on
the linen map its boundaries, and then turns to his
books and shows me the names of the family who
own it, and their ancestors, and the liens upon
it. In some of these villages there are genea-
logical tables which trace back the descent of
each man for ten or even twenty generations.

308 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It may be puzzling to read, but it is clear
enough when you stand in the field and see the
owner and his son, drawing water in the leathern
bucket with their bullocks, walking slowly up and
down the ramp; when you hear the Patwari tell
how the owner came to be the owner; what the
amount of the mortgage is, how much the govern-
ment has remitted on account of a bad year, how
much has been paid back, and how much is still
owing; how much that new well cost, and how
much the government advanced toward its build-
ing; how much the crop from that field in which
you are standing generally fetches, and what pro-
portion is paid in taxes; whether that particular
peasant proprietor is industrious and economical
or not; how many children he has, and what it
costs him to live.

You find that he and his family live upon the
produce of his own land. The corn is ground
into flour in his own house by the womenfolk;
the pulse, spices, and occasional vegetables come
from his own fields ; even the tobacco he smokes,
and the hemp he uses for ropes, are grown by
himself. What little he sells is for money to pay
taxes, buy clothes, and perhaps to pay wages
when he needs additional labor. His cattle are
for milk or work in the fields, for he may not
use them for food, his caste forbidding this. In

BUNIA — PANI 309

the winter he and, so it appears to the visitor in
India, all the rest of the Indian population, are
chewing sugar-cane; in the summer the fruit of
the mango tree is equally popular. When you
attempt to draw him into conversation on the
subject of even the most elementary politics you
find him puzzled and uninterested. He is not
only not demanding "elective institutions," but
he does not know what they are, and the read-
ing of a stray news sheet in the vernacular to
him, by one of his more learned neighbors,
leaves him dazed and bewildered. A voluble
place-hunter, orating to him of his rights and
privileges, leaves him impassive and undisturbed.
The policeman, the headman of his village, the
sight occasionally of a Zaildar, or a European
official, are all he knows of authority. He
sleeps peacefully in the traditions that have
filtered to him through centuries, and would
be happy indeed if he could control Pani and
escape Bunia.

You have your ear against the real heart of
India out there, and you hear it beating. This
is the heart of the hundreds of millions of India.
What you heard in Parliament; what you heard
from the politicians in London ; what you heard
from lawyers and editors in Bombay and Calcutta,
and from teachers and preachers in Aligarh and

310 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Benares, and from missionaries everywhere, is
diagnosis, is theory, is the dreaming of the scio-
list, or the bitter envy of the Brahman. It is
here, with Pani gurgling beneath your feet, with
the tiles of the Bunia's house overtopping the
mud huts of the village, in plain view, with the
Patwari's linen map spread out before you, that
you can put your fingers on India's wrist and
know something of the patient's condition.

The word "Delirium" comes from two Latin
words: "De," meaning "from," and "Lira,"
meaning "furrow." Etymologically, a man in
delirium is one who leaves the furrow, who
ploughs crookedly, who gets out of, and away
from his field. The city-bred man may well
ponder the ancestry of this word. The stirrers-
up of the man working placidly in the fields will
find more hysteria, more delirium in the towns
and cities than in the fields and their furrows.
Here in India, and I am not sure that it is not
as true elsewhere, the patient's pulse beats more
steadily, more quietly in the furrow, than when
leaving the plough and the fields he becomes
giddy in the streets and bazaars of the town.
At any rate it is true that even in our great new
cities of the West, there are few leaders, in what-
ever realm of activity, who are not themselves,
or whose immediate ancestors are not, country-

BUNIA — PANI 311

bred. Two or three generations are about all
that any family can survive of city life. Back
to the land is a modern cry, but it is as old as
language; it is the exact opposite in meaning to
"Delirium."

The English official is not only doing his duty
in making these pilgrimages through the land,
but he is adapting, for purposes of his own, meth-
ods that are as old as India. The Durbar is,
with the exception of certain religious customs,
the oldest, most respected, and the most funda-
mental of all Oriental institutions. Briefly, the
Durbar means : the right of the subject to make,
and the necessity of the ruler to receive and to
hear, petitions in public. The Durbar halls that
one sees everywhere in India are the monuments
of the theory of justice which obtains everywhere
in the East, and which is so imbedded in the
Oriental mind that it is wellnigh impossible to
uproot it. All his rulers of whatever race, and
however despotic, from Kanishka to Akbar and
Aurangzeb, have held Durbars, often daily
Durbars, and no one of them would have dared
to neglect or do away with them.

The Oriental is a religious man. He believes
in the ways of God with men ; he believes it so gen-
uinely that he would make it part and parcel of
his life here. He therefore prefers a ruler who

312 THE WEST IN THE EAST

is omniscient and omnipotent, who is both judge
and executioner. He demands the right to be
heard in public, to receive an answer on the spot,
and to have the decree of the judge executed at
once. If he is to lose his life, or his property, or
his oflSce, or if he is to deprive another of life,
property, or oflfice, that seems to him the simplest
and fairest way to do it. Although the emper-
ors of India were in a sense despots, as are, and
have been, all Eastern rulers, in that they had
the power of life and death, they never have
been despots in the sense that their subjects had
not access to them, and demanded it and re-
ceived it as a right.

The Oriental mind has no conception of equal-
ity between men. Even in matters of justice,
he dislikes rules of procedure, laws of evidence.
He prefers that the matter should be settled face
to face between himself and the ruler. As he
sacrifices to his gods, and does penance and gives
gifts that he may be well treated by them, so like-
wise he sees not justice but only injustice in being
deprived of the opportunity to give gifts, to use
cunning, to bring social or political pressure to
bear upon the man who is to judge him. He does
not scout at equality, he does not even know what
it means. He sees on every hand that men differ
in ability, in wealth, and in influence; and he

BUNIA — PANI 313

wishes to use such superiority as he has, and be-
lieves in the same privilege for other men, even
in the courts, and before his judge, and with
his ruler. He cannot understand that superior
standing in the community is of any value, unless
it can be used even in the courts for his own ad-
vantage. This is a religion in the East; we con-
sider such an attitude criminal in the West. But
how many rich murderers are hanged ; how many
rich thieves are imprisoned ; how many powerful
political bribers are punished, in America ? I
am not sure that any of us really care for justice.
I notice that even religion tempers justice with
divine grace, and that the best human nature
everywhere tempers justice with love.

The Western man believes in himself, not in
God. He hedges every authority with rules and
laws and regulations. Each man, whether judge,
or executive, or representative, is made responsi-
ble to some one else. There is always an appeal
to somebody else. The responsibility goes in a
circle, from the citizen to the magistrate, from
the magistrate to the court, from that court to the
next, thence to Congress itself, and thus back to
the citizen again. Men trust God, when they
believe in Him, but they do not trust men when
they do not believe in Him. The Oriental detests
these roundabout processes. He demands a de-

3U THE WEST IN THE EAST

cree on the spot, from a ruler whom he is willing
to consider infallible. This is the puzzle to the
Western man in all Eastern countries. But that
underlying difference exists in India, China, Per-
sia, Turkey, Egypt, even in Japan, despite their
flimsy imitation of representative government,
today, as it has always existed.

One of the difficulties of governing in India to-
day is this unending circle of responsibility. An
unending correspondence, academic discussions
with annotations, beginning in the village of fifty
huts and ending in Parliament; with the result
that officials who ought to be spending most of
their time travelling through the country, as we
are doing, are bending over desks loaded with
files of documents and letters.

Be it said that all officials from the Viceroy
down, do make these pilgrimages through the
country from time to time, but there would be
much less trouble if they did so far more fre-
quently. Be it said too that I am not advocating
any "off-with-his-head" form of government
here or anywhere else; but this Durbar system,
modified and controlled has its merits ; and to one
who has seen it in actual operation, it is evident
how suitable it is to the situation and how wel-
come it is to the people. In several of the native
regiments the English officers hold Durbars.

BUNIA — PANI 315

The accused is heard in public, judged in public,
and sentenced there and then in the presence of
his fellows. There is no secrecy, no incompre-
hensible rules of procedure ; and I was told over
and over again, by their officers, that the men
seldom objected when punishment was meted
out to them thus in the open.

This camping through the country is a sort of
peripatetic Durbar, a carrying on of the oldest
traditions of the East, and that it is well liked and
looked upon as a boon, as an institution under-
stood by the humblest of the people, is evident by
the welcome accorded the official everywhere.
These are the men ; these men and the army offi-
cers, brought into daily contact with the native
troops, so it seems to me, who are solving the
problems and lightening the burdens of this huge
mass of people in India. It is easy to become
viewy when one gets away from daily contact
with the problems of government. Not only in
the East, but in the West as well, one wonders
sometimes whether we are not devoting so much
time to the teaching and discussion of how to gov-
ern that we forget to govern; and after all the
only way to govern, is to govern. In the West,
representative government has resulted in such a
chaos of law-making that whole communities,
and vast aggregations of capital and labor, are

316 THE WEST IN THE EAST

now engaged in trying to disentangle themselves,
so that they may be free to go about their busi-
ness. Here in India, where only some 500,000
out of the 300,000,000 can write and speak
English, it is necessary that the governing power
should be simple, open to all, and definite.

As I stand in this field in the Punjab, and think
of the seething mass of corruption, political and
moral, in France ; of England, with one in every
forty of her population dependent upon the state ;
of New York, the greatest city in the greatest re-
public in the world, ruled and robbed by the most
corrupt society of plunderers ever kept together
for an hundred years, a society which, if it were
an individual, could only be rivalled by the worst
of the popes, or the most decadent of the Nawabs
of Oudh, I realize that the problem of govern-
ment is not solved by any easy expansion of the
suffrage.

According to the new council provisions, by
which the councils of the Viceroy, and of the gov-
ernors and lieutenant-governors, have been en-
larged by the addition of more Indian members,
the financial statement is subject to the moving
of a resolution by any member. According to this
new rule, these members will have even greater
liberty than is accorded to a member of the Brit-
ish Imperial Parliament itself. A member of

BUNIA — PANl 317

Parliament may not propose an increase of ex-
penditure, but only the reduction of a grant. An
Indian member of these new councils may pro-
pose an increase of expenditure, provided the
source from which it can be met is indicated.

I was present at the opening of the first re-
formed council of the Lieutenant-Governor of the
Punjab at Lahore, as the guest of His Honour,
and I saw the members sworn in. With the taste
for oratory, and for metaphysical discussion, of
the educated native, and there was evidence of
these qualities even on this occasion, these English
officials will have even less time than now for
travelling through the country. These officials
are overworked now, and from that plucky and
daring sportsman. Lord Minto, down, I saw man
after man who was overstrained by the responsi-
bilities put upon him. The sad feature of it is
that it is red tape that does it. Problems that an
official ought to solve on the spot, in Durbar
fashion, go roaming their way through reams of
correspondence, checked by this one and that
one, until the simple problem, probably arising
from Pani or Bunia, becomes an octopus, with
a bewildered official at the end of each tentacle.

I beg that my American readers will notice
this contrast between the poor peasant of the
Punjab and the emphatic display made by the

318 THE WEST IN THE EAST

enlarging of the provincial councils. Perhaps
500,000 Indians are affected by the latter, while
there are 299,500,000 of the former. The 299,-
500,000 are dumb and inaudible; but they are
the people whom England has torn from the grip
of tyranny, and to whom she owes the stern safe-
guarding of their interests. She has no right to
forget them, to lessen her care of them, by having
too few officials to look after them, while engaged
in academic discussions of the rights of a few to
representation.

We have exactly the same problem confront-
ing us in the Philippines and in Cuba. From
priest and tyrant we extricated the natives, and
our first duty is to them. Why do these rheto-
ricians in India, in the Philippines, and in Cuba
demand the right to govern now, when we as
the responsible police must in the end bear the
burden of blunders or of dangers .'^ Why did
they not save their country when she was in
chains ? What proofs have we that they are
capable now.? None!

Indeed we are finding, even amongst the en-
lightened citizens of America, that representa-
tive government is not the solution of all prob-
lems, not the remedy for all diseases. In many
of our communities they have discovered the
viciousness of this circle of responsibility, with its

BUNIA — PANI 319

tail in its mouth. There are nearly an hundred
towns and small cities in America governed by
Commissions, at the time of this writing. The
citizens have chosen from three to half a dozen
experts to manage their municipal affairs. They
have transferred their authority as representatives
to them, and they hold them responsible. This
method has proved so economical, so eflScient, and
gives the private citizen so much more time for
his own affairs, that the number of communities
wishing to be so governed is rapidly on the in-
crease. Government by reverberation touched
up with stealing, has proved so costly, and so
insolently negligent, that even the easy-going
and optimistic American is turning from it to
government by experts. As we have shown in
another chapter (From Mughal to Briton) the
roads of life are becoming overcrowded, and
men have all they can do to carry their burdens
and to keep on the road, without the delay and
amateur fumbling of keeping the road guarded
and in repair. That should be left to trained
road-builders.

If the British in India, and we in the Philip-
pines and in the West Indies, permit ourselves to
be led astray in our colonies, either by ignorant
politicians at home or by self-seeking politicians
in our colonies, we shall prove ourselves unfaith-

320 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ful to over 300,000,000 of ignorant and helpless
wards, representing one-fifth of the inhabitants
of the globe.

The cleanest, the healthiest, and the most eco-
nomically governed towns and cities in the world
are in Germany, and the viewy reverberator and
the politician by trade receive small shrift there ;
for their passing has enabled Germany to support
the most formidable army, one of the most
powerful navies, the second largest merchant
marine, and the second largest export and import
trade in the world, with a population of 65,000,-
000, living in an area of slightly more than
200,000 square miles.

The conflict in India should not be narrowed
to an academical discussion between Oxford and
Cambridge babus, and Bengali babus. No
buncombe plea at home, no cunning arguments
by educated natives abroad, should tempt us to
hand over our wards to the mercy of amateur
politicians.

VIII

A VISITOR'S DIARY

FROM the south to the north of India is a
long way; but the difference in the alert-
ness, the physique, and the faces of the
inhabitants makes it seem as though you had
gone clean out of one country into another. It
is almost like going from the streets of a factory
town in New England, or old England, to our
Western plains, or to the Highlands of Scotland,
to go from the bazaars of southern or central
India to the northern frontier. They are a
bold, fine-looking lot, these Pathans and Afridis.
The Pathans are allied to the Afghans ; and the
Afridis are one of the large clans, or tribes, of
the hills between India and Afghanistan.

Never have I seen, in one hour's walk, so many
lean, upstanding, fearless-looking, fine-featured,
eagle-eyed men, as in Peshawar and the Khaibar
Pass. Their faces remind one of the faces of our
own Indians of the North-west of twenty-five
years ago, chiefs like Red-Cloud and HoUow-

321

322 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Horn-Bear, whose faces were like reddish-brown
masks of Dante or Savonarola.

Peshawar is the head-quarters of the first army
division, and is in the extreme northern corner of
India. It is the residence of the Chief Commis-
sioner of the North- West Provinces. It is at the
southern entrance to the Khaibar Pass, which
is the narrow road through the mountains to
Afghanistan. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and
Fridays, the caravans go and come. Hundreds
of camels, donkeys, and oxen, loaded with mer-
chandise from Central Asia, from Afghanistan,
from Merve and Bokhara and even beyond, choke
the road. The British distribute a subsidy of
about fifty thousand dollars a year among the
headmen of these fighting tribes, in lieu of the
loot that they took from the caravans in the old
days; and for these two days in each week cara-
vans are permitted to go and come in safety. The
British have organized a force of some fifteen
hundred men from these Afridis, nine hundred
infantry, and six hundred cavalry, in charge of a
dozen European officers, and they are the guar-
dians of the Pass. It is a lonely business for
the British officers who command these wild fel-
lows at these outposts. They are not only the
British pickets on the outermost frontier, they
are the pickets for the whole white race, between

A VISITOR'S DIARY 323

them and the Tartar and the Mongol ; between
Asia and Europe in short. Through this Khai-
bar Pass they have rushed the defences, these
Persians, Tartars, Turks, Afghans, and Mughals,
time and time again, and in every century down
to this present century, and they are untamed
still. The officers in these mountainous wilds
may not even go out for a day's shooting without
an armed escort.

When we left Peshawar to drive through the
Pass, the officer with us carried his holsters with
him; not that there is danger of a rising, or an
outbreak, but these fanatical Muhammadans
sometimes break out, one at a time, into hys-
terical religious rage, run amok, as it is called,
and seek salvation by the murder of an infidel.
It is a narrow road, and all along it on the
hills above one sees at intervals the Afridi
Rifles, stationed to guard the passing cara-
vans. The camels shuffle along, their noses in
the air, loaded with women and children, and
all sorts of goods of every description. The
donkeys too carry baskets filled with chickens,
amongst other things; and women and children
and chickens alike seem no more concerned than
the people one sees in a passing train at home.

There are noise, and bustle, and dust, and
shouting enough when the caravan from the north

324 THE WEST IN THE EAST

meets and passes the caravan from the south;
but camels, and donkeys, and bullocks, and
sheep, and men, pass one another somehow in
the clouds of dust, and come out of this moving
cat's cradle each with his own. Boxes of tea,
furniture, pans and kettles, and here and there a
Jewal, or camel bag, one of the beautiful carpets
made in Merve of silk and Pashmina, a kind of
sheep; the wool being taken for these fine car-
pets only from the root part of the wool, may be
seen, and perhaps bought, or perhaps an old
Pindi carpet, and than these there is nothing
finer of the kind in the world.

But it is only on Tuesdays and Fridays that
this road is a safe and quiet place for the traffic
and merchandise. On other days you go at
your own risk. Family and tribal feuds have
free play, at other times, and there is seldom a
day when one or another is not taking a pot shot
at an enemy; there the dogs of war, small though
they be, are snarling, snapping, and biting all the
time. The recruits for this corps of Afridi Ri-
fles are drawn from men of different tribes, who
forget their feuds for the time, but renew them
diligently when they have a few weeks' leave.

An officer of high rank was leading some troops
through the Pass on one occasion, when he was
annoyed by a tribesman above the road who kept

A VISITOR'S DIARY 325

abreast of them, and every now and then took a
shot at them. One of the Afridi escort volun-
teered to hunt this man down, but the officer said
no, it did not matter. At last a bullet struck so
close that the officer's horse stumbled and nearly
fell. Then the soldier was told he might go and
try to track down the persistent marksman. In
an hour or two, the escort saw a puff of smoke,
and the man was seen to fall and roll down the
cliff. The Afridi returned and reported. The
officer complimented and thanked him. "Oh,
that's nothing," replied the soldier, "I should not
be worthy to serve the white king if I could not do
that." Why was it so easy.? he was asked. "Be-
cause that man up there himself taught me to
track," he replied. "You knew him, then ?" said
the officer. "Oh, yes, I knew him. That was
my father!"

They are indeed a wild community. Their
women are slaves who are trafficked in like cat-
tle. A man's father dies, for example, and the son
puts up his mother and sisters at auction, as part
of the estate. You see men working in the fields,
or on the road, a gun slung over their shoulders,
carried there as the safest place for it. Here and
there are small fortresses of mud, where this fam-
ily or that protects itself from attack, or sits watch-
ing an opportunity to bring down a passing ene-

326 THE WEST IN THE EAST

my. I saw a long ditch leading from the road,
and looking like the dry bed of a canal, and I
was told that this was the ingenious path made
by a certain householder to get to the road out
of reach of his enemy's rifle, whose house was
near by. It is veritably the last remaining cock-
pit of the world, these hills and mountain paths
between northern India, and central Asia and
Afghanistan.

The Amir of Afghanistan winks at the lawless-
ness, not altogether displeased to have these wild
tribesmen between his dominions and the Brit-
ish. The Amir is an independent ruler, except
that he may not make treaties or give franchises
without the consent of the British Government.

It was from these wild fellows that the truly
wonderful corps of "The Queen's Own Corps
of Guides " was recruited. There are some four-
teen hundred of them, infantry and cavalry, com-
manded by British officers and picked from the
dare-devils of this devil's own country. There
are Afridis, Pathans, Khuttucks, Sikhs, Punjabi
Muhammadans, Punjabi Hindus, Gurkhas, Tur-
comans, Persian Farsiwans, Kabulis, and Dogras
among them. Sir Henry Lawrence, of Lucknow
fame, started the organization and gave it its name,
and Harry Lumsden was their first commander.
For sixty years they have deserved the confidence

A VISITOR'S DIARY 327

and the hopes of their founder, by their loyalty,
their daring, their trustworthiness; and as their
founder was a Lawrence, one can hardly say
more. When the Mutiny broke out they marched
five hundred and eighty miles to Delhi, marching
on an average twenty-seven miles a day, at the
hottest time of year, through the hottest re-
gion on earth. As they neared the Ridge at
Delhi after this almost unprecedented feat of en-
durance, a staff officer rode up and said: "How
soon will you be ready to go into action ?" "In
half an hour," was the cheery answer of their
commander, Daly ; and in the fight that followed
every British officer, including Daly, was killed
or wounded.

"And men in desert places, men

Abandoned, broken, sick with fears
Rose singing, swung their swords agen.
And laughed and died among the spears."

Readers weary of the self-advertising crew of
explorers, amateur soldiers, sportsmen, and poli-
ticians ; weary too of even the gallant Sir Galahads
of fiction ; may turn to "The Story of the Guides,"
by one of their commanders, Younghusband,
with promise of refreshment and encouragement.
There are real men among us still, both brown
and white, who not only do their duty without

328 THE WEST IN THE EAST

making a fuss about it, but who die doing it; and
their only reward is, that there is a gulp in the
throat and a wetness about the eyelids as we
read; and a tightening of the lips, and a prayer
that we may do half as well, but, well or ill, that
we may not be tempted into the maudlin modern
malady of self-advertisement. It makes the
chorus-girl posturings of many of our candidates
for popular applause look shamefully ridiculous.

That Khaibar Pass is indeed "the way of sin-
ners" ; but the "Story of the Guides" shows how
these very sinners may be made weapons, and
ideally-tempered weapons, for the defence of the
right, when they are disciplined and led by the
right men.

Very different is this Muhammadan city of
Peshawar from those villages in the Punjab.
The streets are crowded with fierce-looking men,
Kashmiris, Nepalese, Beluchis, Tibetans, Yar-
kandis, Bokhariots, and Turcomans, armed most
of them, and in every kind of costume. They
pour in here twice a week from Afghanistan, from
the surrounding districts, and from central Asia;
and you have seen something new indeed in the
way of wild life from the top of the world, after a
few hours among them. They have the look of
men who depend upon their own prowess, and
not upon the law, for their safety.

A VISITOR'S DIARY 329

I stationed myself upon the top of the high city
gate one morning, and watched the housekeeping
in the town. Each house has a roofless room,
with walls some ten feet high, and as you look
down, you may see the women and children, the
cats and pigeons, the sewing and washing, the
combing of hair, and the home life of the whole
population. The women and children, the cats
and pigeons are there, but the men are in the
streets ; and to see the barber stropping his razor
on his shin, and shaving a customer in the road,
full of camels, goats, bullocks, carts, and pedes-
trians, is to see two men whose nerves must have
been disciplined by much familiarity with cold
steel.

The military is much in evidence here, and at a
dinner at the house of the general commanding,
one sees uniforms from every branch of the ser-
vice, and medals won all over the world ; and hears
talk, and stories of the adventurous life of these
frontiersmen of the Empire. I dance in the state
quadrille with my host, the Chief Commissioner's
wife, as my partner, and a crow one must look, in-
deed, in this crowd of brilliant uniforms. During
these holiday weeks at Christmas-time, Peshawar,
and Lahore, and Lucknow, where I happened to
be, were gay indeed with dinners and dances, and
polo and horse-shows, and one catches glimpses

330 THE WEST IN THE EAST

now and then of some of the hangers-on of the
oflBcial life here, who, having no duties and no
responsibilities, furnish the gossip, scandal, and
heart-burnings of the social life of India. "Do
you see that woman ?" said a bluff colonel to me
at a certain dance. "Well, she ought to be de-
ported." It was easy to see what he meant,
particularly if you had met the lady at dinner.
They drift out from England, through some at-
tenuated connection with the civil or military
life here, and some of them are odd specimens
enough. Weather-beaten female warriors they
look. One I can see now, in the twilight of her
youth, a widow, grass or genuine I know not
which, lean and tough of physique; no matter
how long she stewed she would not make broth
for a meal; with a prehensile smirk, as though
she would fasten on to anybody. Indeed, watch-
ing her methods, I should not have been sur-
prised, at any time, to see her take flight with a
juicy subaltern dripping in her talons.

Harvard men may be surprised, as they will be
proud to learn, that a Doctor of Philosophy of
their making, an archaeologist now in the employ
of the British Government, has turned up here as
the discoverer of the casket said to contain the
bones of Buddha. It is a recent discovery, and
one of the most important, and he brought it him-

A VISITOR'S DIARY 331

self, and showed us the Greek designs, and the
name of the Scythian King Kanishka upon it;
Kanishka who ruled in north-east India about
40 A. D., and who was an enthusiastic disciple of
Buddha, and who had the sacred books codified,
after a great council of Buddhist priests and
scholars, which he convened to discuss the mat-
ter. This learned enthusiast from Harvard rep-
resents the West in the East indeed, and with
dignity.

During the greater part of one's wanderings in
India, one sees little, and how wise it is that this
is so, of the armed men who are the real grip on
India; but as you travel north you see the bow-
string drawn tauter and tauter, until here at
Peshawar it is ready to let fly the arrow at any
moment of the day or night ; and from these fron-
tier tribesmen themselves, is welded the arrow-
head.

It is easy to understand the British respect,
and even reverence, for health and character and
courage. They are the foundations of his su-
premacy as a ruler at home, but particularly
abroad. It is evident at once, out here, how
useless is a weak man either physically or mor-
ally. No amount of mental brilliancy would
compensate for the lack of physical staying
power. The Indians understand these qualities

332 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and trust them. The educated Indians have
carried off many prizes in the way of intellectual
feats of prowess, even at the English universities,
and against the stoutest rivals, but they them-
selves recognize that the world rests upon the
bulk and steadiness of the elephant, rather than
upon the cunning of the fox; or as the Chinese
would say, upon the tortoise, which they claim
is one of the nine offspring of the dragon, and
the emblem of strength.

Some of these dark people have the faces, and
the port and carriage, of power; but it is hollow,
the shadow of an inheritance not the real sub-
stance. It is as though the masks of warriors
and sages were walking about untenanted. The
character and power have become exhausted,
leaving the husk of a great civilization gone to
seed.

The hospitality of these Englishmen knows no
bounds. Despite his crowd of guests at this holiday
season, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab
takes us in at Lahore ; and the famous camel car-
riage, drawn by six trotting camels harnessed in
pairs, each pair with a postilion, swings us away,
soon after our arrival, at a good pace, to the polo
ground. I have seen no polo anywhere, prob-
ably no one else has, comparable to the polo
played by our American team when they won the

A VISITOR'S DIARY 333

championship in London ; but on these hard In-
dian grounds, mounted on thorough-bred ponies,
the polo, played with sticks with whippier han-
dles than ours, is an astonishing exhibition of
speed. The Indian players, light and supple,
seem to depend upon their wrists, and upon the
resiliency of the shafts of their mallets, to send
the ball along over the hard ground. The white
and the brown play together. Here, as at home,
the Englishman knows no class on the play-
ground ; the only distinction made is between the
straight and the crooked, the skilful and the
awkward.

It was here in Lahore that the British Em-
pire's patriot poet, Kipling, began his work in the
local newspaper oflBce; and what I am now see-
ing all over India, of the cheery, stout-hearted
civil and military officers, bred in him that flavor
of virility which he has distributed for the white
man's encouragement around the world.

The city was here before even Alexander the
Great came ; was in its glory when the lieutenants
of the Great Mughals were its governors; was
later the capital of the Sikh warriors, who gave
the British the toughest resistance of all their
fighting experiences in India, under their great
commander Maharaja Ran jit Singh; and is now
a city of two hundred thousand souls, living in

334 THE WEST IN THE EAST

a space of some five hundred acres, surrounded
by the remains of the old city wall.

The Lieutenant-Governor mounts me upon his
elephant, for the narrow streets are too crowded
for a carriage, and a foot-passenger would make
his way but slowly; but "My Lord the Ele-
phant," with his bell hanging from his neck, his
trunk swinging from side to side, his great bulk
shuffled along on his cushioned feet, needs no
police nor outriders to make way for him. He
is himself bigger than many of the shops and
houses, and from his howdah you may see all
the layers of domestic life on both sides of the
streets, from the squatting merchant on the level
of the door-sill, to the women and children
above, and the son training his carrier-pigeons
on the roof. Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and
Aurangzeb, all left monuments of their rule here;
and when Shah Jahan was ruler in Delhi, and
his Vizier, Wazir Khan, ruled in Lahore, were
days of wealth and splendor; but the Sikh con-
queror had no taste for these; he was, and is for
that matter, a warrior, and most of the splendid
monuments have crumbled and gone; and in
their place are the broad avenues of the British
residential quarters, with Government House,
the English and Catholic cathedrals, and the
fine buildings of the Aitchison College.

A VISITOR'S DIARY 335

How the Mughal rulers, or Alexander the
Great, would have stared in bewilderment had
they seen what I saw in Lahore! First, early
one morning I accompanied the Lieutenant-Gov-
ernor to the grounds of Aitchison College, and
saw the ceremony of the laying of two corner-
stones, one for a Hindu temple, the other for a
Sikh Dharmsala. The Aitchison College is a
sort of public school for the education of the
sons of chiefs, and as Hindu and Sikh are both
represented, both are encouraged to have tem-
ples of their faith there. Later on that same
morning, I was present at the opening of the first
reform council, and heard the members sworn
in and take the oath, some in the native language,
but the majority in English. The reformed coun-
cil here, as in other provinces of India, is a recent
and far-reaching change, which permits a certain
number of elected members, and also widens the
scope of discussion to such an extent, that gov-
ernors and lieutenant-governors will need the
delicate diplomacy of skilful presiding officers, to
expedite the business of their provinces. It is
another burden, another demand for uncommon
ability, and one wonders whether the breed of
laborious archangels in Great Britain, is keep-
ing up with the ever-increasing demands made
upon it.

336 THE WEST IN THE EAST

These things would have astonished Jahangir,
but had he accompanied me to the prison, he
would have been bewildered indeed. In La-
hore is the central prison of the Punjab for long-
sentence prisoners. It is situated in an airy,
healthy spot, and its cleanliness and orderliness
and air of comfort must make it a tempting place
of residence, to natives accustomed to the village
hut or the crowded bazaar. What a change
from the dungeon, or a sack and the river; from
the gibbet, or the crushing knees of an elephant,
which were the swifter and surer methods of
India's former rulers.

The Aitchison Chiefs' College takes its name
from a former lieutenant-governor, and is in-
tended for the training of the sons of the princes
and chiefs of the Punjab. The buildings are in a
fine park, and there are playing fields, stables, and
gymnasium, and dining-rooms and dormitories.
There are some eighty boys there now, ranging in
age from eight to seventeen. They get, with
modifications, the training of an English public-
school boy. Some of them were strikingly hand-
some, with a look of breeding about them. They
take to hockey, but not so well to the hurly-burly
of foot-ball, the masters told me ; and as in sim-
ilar institutions in the West, the results are good
in some cases, indifferent in others. The corner-

A VISITOR'S DIARY 337

stone was only laid as lately as 1888, so that it is
not fair, perhaps, to ask proof of the value of the
college. India needs administrators, men who
will devote themselves to the care and develop-
ment of their own property, whether it be small
or great; but the Indian Raja inclines to the
military profession, and there he is shut off by
the disinclination to let him rise to a grade where
he would be given the task of commanding
Europeans. This is one of the problems of ad-
ministration in India: to know what to do with
these young men, many of them wealthy and am-
bitious, but who are barred from holding the
higher oflSces to which their rank and their pref-
erences lead them.

The college; the swearing in of the reformed
council; the prison; and the two temples side by
side but of different faiths, are the monuments the
British are setting up here, in the room of the
mosques, and tombs, and palaces of dalliance,
now in ruins, of their predecessors.

I visited the Rajput College founded by the
Maharaja of Jaipur; the college at Amritsar,
where stands also the Golden Temple, the centre
of Sikh worship; the Daly College at Indore;
and the Anglo-Muhammadan College at Aligarh,
founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who seems to
have been a broad-church Muhammadan ; and the

338 THE WEST IN THE EAST

college I have just mentioned . The reason under-
lying these foundations is broadly that the Indian
youth, whether Rajput, Sikh, Muhammadan, or
Hindu, may be trained as well as taught. In
India, whatever the sect or caste, morality is based
wholly upon religion; and bad as the results of
education without religious teaching are proving
themselves to be in the West, they are even worse
in India. English rule to-day in India is suffer-
ing as much from that one fatal error as from all
other causes put together. India is offered a
strange and unsettling education, without any
safeguards of moral discipline ; and the Universi-
ties of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Lahore, and
Allahabad, which are mere examining bodies,
with no provisions for moral or religious super-
vision, have spawned the scurrilous garrulity of
the native press, and the spurious patriotism of
the political murderer. This secular education
of a race physically and morally feeble is only
producing talkers and plotters, not doers. Eng-
land is corupromising in this matter, and letting
her conscience play the fool. She is thrusting a
thin secular education upon the unprepared and
unstable, and turning out by the score weak
fanatics and silly, would-be tyrants. Even those
picked bands, the Pilgrims and the Puritans,
misunderstood freedom in the beginning, and set

A VISITOR'S DIARY 339

up a moral, religious, and social tyranny in New
England almost unequalled in its severity. What
is to be expected from the dregs of this washed-
out Indian civilization, if such was the result
among the very flower of the moral heroism of the
seventeenth century! The Prince Agha Khan,
who has succeeded Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as
patron of the Muhammadan College at Aligarh,
writes: "We want Aligarh to be such a home of
learning as to command the same respect of
scholars as Berlin or Oxford, Leipsic or Paris.
Above all, we want to create for our people an
intellectual and moral capital." This is ambi-
tious, but it puts the emphasis where it belongs.
We live together in our closely packed modern
society, first by virtue of our similarity of actions,
next by our similarity of moral ideals, and only
last by our similarity of intellectual development
and tastes. This means that self-control and
moral discipline are to be taught first, and book-
learning last. The ability to read and to write
is such a modern accomplishment among the
masses, that we point to it as the cross of salva-
tion in the sky: by this shall you conquer! But
it is only because it is an untried remedy. It is
working untold evil among the superficially ed-
ucated ; and even the man of letters is but a girlish
personage, unless he escapes from the tyranny of

340 THE WEST IN THE EAST

books, and beats his learning into sword or
ploughshare upon the rough anvil of the world of
men. The freedom of libraries to the mentally
unstable is as dangerous as the freedom of the
city to the morally unsound ; and this littering of
the land with libraries will one day be looked
upon not as a charity, but as a folly; and the
liberty to do so will be as carefully restricted as
the starting of national banks.

But if we are to see anything of this many-
shaded rainbow life of India, we may not halt too
long over the discussion of these matters. We
must be off now to pay visits to His Highness
the Maharaja of Kapurthala, and His Highness
the Maharaja of Patiala. We are whisked away
from the station at Katarpur in motor-cars seven
miles to Kapurthala, the State of some six hun-
dred and fifty square miles, and three hundred
thousand people, of a native prince, who has
turned to France rather than to England, for his
training and amusements. The guest-house is
well furnished, lighted by electricity, supplied
with open fires, and stands in a park of its own,
not far from the palace. The palace where we
dine in the evening is only just finished, built on
a French model and furnished in the most luxu-
rious and finished taste. It is much the finest
modern building of its kind in India, and one of

A VISITOR'S DIARY 341

the finest in the world, and France may well be
proud of this, her most imposing modern monu-
ment in India. I took in to dinner the famous
Spanish beauty, who is the Prince's lately mar-
ried wife. The dinner was served in European
fashion, with one dish, a Kapurthala curry, that
would have won praise from Brillat-Savarin him-
self. If I were an Indian rival to the throne, des-
tined to die, I should ask to have the diamond-
dust given me in that curry.

The next day, after a ride before breakfast, the
stables, the law-courts, the treasury are visited,
winding up with a presentation to, and a chat
with, the Maharaja's council. In the afternoon
we go to the palace for tea and tennis, and the
Maharaja proves himself no mean opponent
with the racquet.

My host furnishes a regiment of infantry to the
Imperial Service troops, and Colonel Asgar Ali,
his commander-in-chief, gives me a rare treat the
next day. We have a sham-fight. A distant
village is to be taken, and next to fighting your-
self, being umpire is the choice post. We gal-
loped about for hours watching the men work,
my companion suggesting and advising, the rifles
popping away with blank cartridges, and finally
a wild charge against the village defences, the
call: "Cease firing"; and barring a few bruises,

342 THE WEST IN THE EAST

we start back, to the music of a first-rate drum
and fife corps, none of us the worse, all of us the
better, indeed, for the vigorous exercise.

I suppose one could interest oneself in the ad-
ministration of a small far-away State like this of
Kapurthala, and keep oneself busy; but it is not
a job the average Oriental cares for. All these
States are to all intents and purposes insured by
the British, which makes for irresponsibility in
the rulers. Many of them lapse into dissipation,
and long for the change travel in Europe affords.
Few of them realize that luxury is the most un-
comfortable thing in the world; indeed it is only
a few intelligent men in the West, who have dis-
covered it, and who strive to keep themselves
hard, as a mere matter of daily comfort.

Our own millionaires drape themselves in the
costly artistic spoils of Europe, and cushion their
women and themselves in over-ornamented pal-
aces, breed a few forlorn spenders ; and one finds
the frayed fringes of the third and fourth gene-
rations strewn about the capitals of Europe, or
comfortably potted in club windows at home.
One should not be too hard upon the Oriental
princes therefore. The inequalities of wealth are
the more exasperating when they are new. Pos-
sessors of wealth without traditions, and without
responsibilities, and without distinguished mental

A VISITOR'S DIARY 343

or moral attributes, lend themselves easily to the
onslaughts of the discontented, and of the social
and economic fanatics. We must agree that
mere spending power, unrelieved by grace or
graciousness, is a vulgar thing, and not easy to
defend; but one should not lose one's temper
over it. The most salient feature of our Ameri-
can life, to many on-lookers, seems to be our mil-
lionaires. But look at their descendants ! Could
there be a more ludicrous outcome of great en-
deavor! The mountain and the mouse indeed!

One is dismayed at the lack of healthy humor in
Americans, that they do not see that the million-
aire as an individual is almost more heavUy han-
dicapped than anybody else, so far as the perpet-
uation of his power is concerned. The shirt-
sleeves are hardly covered by a coat, the table-
knife introduced to a fork, the illiteracy concealed
by a layer of polite usages, before the descendants,
fatuous, foul, or foolish, are on their way back to
the shirt-sleeves, the unaccompanied knife, and
the unformed manners, speech, and writing. This
phase of our civilization calls not for spiteful envy,
not even for laughter, though it is hard to re-
press it, but for pity. At any rate it gives us no
vantage-ground for criticism of the East.

His Highness the Maharaja of Patiala, who
governs a state of five thousand square miles in

344 THE WEST IN THE EAST

area, and a population of a million and a half, is
one of the younger princes and only lately come
to the throne. He had one wife before he came
into power in October, 1909; since then he has
exercised the privilege of his faith, and married
two more. I arrived as his guest, in time to be
present at a banquet given in the great Durbar
Hall of his capital, in honor of the birthday of
the Maharani. The hall was entirely lighted by
more than two thousand candles, in huge glass
candelabra twenty-five feet high. The meal was
served in courses, by a small army of servants,
and the very good native band played familiar
European airs, and even one or two of our darky
Southern songs, and played them well. Seated
beside the Diwan, or minister of finance of His
Highness, I asked whose birthday was being cel-
ebrated and toasted, but even he did not know
which one! There were of course no native
women present. Here as elsewhere in India no
woman of rank is supposed to show herself in
public. Indeed it is the common custom among
Hindus as well as among Muhammadans,as soon
as a man has sufficient means to enable him to
support the women of his family in idleness, to
permit them, and the women themselves are
more eager for it than the men, to adopt the Mu-
hammadan custom of Purdah, to retire to the

A VISITOR'S DIARY 345

Zenana, or women's quarters, and only appear
in public with the face covered. We have a sim-
ilar custom in the West of keeping our women in
idleness; but we exploit a startling amount of
their persons, at public and private entertain-
ments, as an ornamental compensation, I sup-
pose, for their isolation from many forms of use-
ful activity. That universal prayer-book of the
West, the only prayer-book indeed loved and
pondered over by both the pious and the proud,
"The Imitation," says: "Be not familiar with
any woman; but commend all good women in
general to God."

An officer of the household drove me about
the capital the next day, and showed me the Ma-
haraja's jewels and treasury, and the great dia-
mond valued at a quarter of a million of dollars.
Though the Prince himself is a Sikh, this officer
was a Mussulman, and claimed that the cleavage
among the people of India, and the consequent
racial jealousies, have increased since the Brit-
ish domination. They have fostered these jeal-
ousies, he said, that the resultant antagonisms
may protect them. He agreed, as did every in-
telligent man I met in India, for that matter, that
India needs British rule, and respects British
rule, but dislikes the arrogance, selfishness, and
coldness of the Englishman.

346 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The State of Patiala supplies a force of nearly
two thousand men to the Imperial Service troops,
and one day they were marched out and put
through their paces, and finally marched past
for me to review. Young Prince Hitendra of
Kooch Behar, who was also a guest at this time,
and who had his string of polo ponies with him,
mounted me on Straight Shot — one remembers
the name even, of so good a mount as that — and
we had a fine day with the troops. One may go
far to find smarter light cavalry than these Sikh
lancers of Patiala. A long row of lancers gal-
loped up, dismounted, pulled their horses to the
ground where they lay stock still. Another and
then another galloped up behind and performed
the same manoeuvre; as each man dismounted
he lifted his horse's near fore-leg, then tightened
the right rein, and down he went, and there he
stayed without a motion ; looking carefully I saw
not a single horse rebel. At the sound of a whis-
tle they rose together, and were off like a flight
of birds.

The next day I had another of the days in In-
dia to be marked with a white stone. We were
driven in motor-cars out to a wide plain, with
clumps of trees dotted about, but the whole sur-
rounded by dense woods. On our arrival we
were greeted by what I took to be a whole vil-

A VISITOR'S DIARY 347

lage. There were elephants, camels, bullock-
carts, five hundred mounted troops, and an army
of beaters on foot. Their task was to form a ring
around the wide open space, and to drive the
wild boars out into the open. We mounted, I
was given a long spear, and told briefly how to
use it, and what dangers to avoid, and off we
trotted : His Highness, one or two native ofiicers,
the Resident, Major Molyneux of the Imperial
Service troops, Prince Hitendra, and I.

I remember when I first saw fat pheasants,
walking about in their preserve on a large estate
in England, that I thought pheasant-shooting
must be an easy game enough. I also remember
that when I began shooting, as they came like
bullets over the tree-tops, high in the air, that I
revised completely my estimate of the skill re-
quired in that sport.

When you are mounted on a fast thorough-bred
pony, with six feet of steel-pointed spear in your
hand, and set out for the first time to go pig-
sticking, you feel rather sorry for the pig. But
when two or three hundred pounds of wild boar,
with a hide like a rhinoceros, curling tusks, and
muscles of wire and rawhide, shoots by in front
of your galloping pony, turning, twisting, charg-
ing across you, and even at you, here again the
game in reality is far different from what jour
ignorance had pictured.

348 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It was not long before, blown, hot, and tired,
I felt no compunction about sticking a pig, if I
could get near one, and all sympathy was for my-
self. To part company with your saddle, and to
fall near these erinaceous brigands, is to be ripped
from thigh to chin by their sharp tusks before
there is time for rescue. This happens now and
again, and probably if it did not happen no one
would go pig-sticking. You think of that when
you are still cold in the saddle; just as the stone
walls, and mud fences, and ditches of Tipperary
County, Ireland, seem formidable before you
get warmed up, and then you either take them
with your horse, or in a "voluntary" without him,
but never with much thought of their size. So
too you forget their tusks, and thick hides, and
their unparalleled ability to "buck the line," and
their awe-inspiring dentition, when you have
speared over, and under, one or two of these wild
boars ; and you shut your teeth, and take another
grip of your spear, and settle yourself more firmly
in your saddle, and swoop down upon another
boar scuttling away, as though his death were a
patriotic demand, or the ideal of some high
though ferocious standard of duty.

I took things quietly at first, watching the old
hands at the game, and then I tried my hand,
once, twice, three times, and failed. It was no
fault of the pony who followed these bristling.

A VISITOR'S DIARY 349

dodging, and ferocious polo balls as though they
were only wooden; he knew the game well
enough, and perhaps deserves more credit than I
for the pig I finally brought down.

As I am telling the story, I might properly
enough enlarge upon this pig, as he was the first
and last, and probably the only one, I shall ever
spear. He was not one of the largest killed that day,
but he was the only one that went down from one
spear thrust, not to rise again. He ought to have
had the spear behind the shoulder, but he got it
behind the left ear; like so many neophytes I ap-
peared more skilful than I was. At this game the
man who gets his spear into the pig first is by
courtesy his slayer, but it is rare that one, or even
half a dozen spear thrusts, are enough. They
keep going until the steel reaches a vital part, and
they give and take no quarter. His Highness
presented me with my spear at the close of the
day's sport, and both spear and boar's head are
here to look up at on the wall as years go by ; and
by the time the grandchildren are old enough
to ask what it is, that boar will have grown to be
a very large, and a very fierce boar indeed ! When
we returned to the motor-cars we found a large
square tent carpeted with rugs, furnished with
chairs and tables, and a hot luncheon ready for
us. Tents go up and come down in India as

350 THE WEST IN THE EAST

easily apparently as we open and shut an um-
brella.

But that is but a Tent wherein may rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;

The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes and prepares it for another guest.

The Imperial Service troops date from 1888,
when the native chiefs offered to share in the de-
fence of the Empire. The irregular and undis-
ciplined forces of the native states were organ-
ized into smaller bodies, to be trained under the
supervision of British officers, who now number
twenty-one. The strength of these bodies of
troops amounts to twenty thousand men of whom
two thousand eight hundred belong to the trans-
port trains. The polo-playing and horse-loving
Maharaja of Jodhpur furnishes a regiment of
lancers; the desert state of Bikaner, a camel-
corps which has seen service in Africa and China ;
I spent a morning looking over the train of trans-
port carts of the Jaipur state; Kapurthala fur-
nishes infantry, and Patiala light cavalry; and all
of these corps are officered and commanded by
men of their own neighborhood, with the Maha-
raja in each case as commander-in-chief.

Once a year the athletic contingents from these
corps come together for the annual athletic meet-

A VISITOR'S DIARY 351

ing. The meeting of 1910 was held in the native
state of Her Highness Sultan Begum, the present
Nawab of Bhopal, who rules over an area of
seven thousand square miles and a population
of six hundred and seventy thousand. It was
through the good offices of Major-General F.
H. R. Drummond, the hard-working Inspector-
General of these Imperial Service troops, that I
was invited by Her Highness to be her guest
during the week. Her Highness, and Queen
Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, are the only
women ruling States in the world to-day. Far
apart as are the Muhammadan Begum and the
Protestant Queen, they are equally respected
and beloved. My crust of provincial ignorance
was badly cracked, when at my first interview
with the Begum, covered from head to foot, and
with only the shine of her eyes visible through
the two slits in her head-covering, she discussed
with me the comparative value of tutors, schools,
or kindergarten methods for her grandchildren;
and on the other hand averred solemnly that
the illness of one of her sons was undoubtedly
due to the comet, of which there was much talk
at the time. She had made the pilgrimage to
Mecca and when her party was attacked in the
desert, by a roving band of Arabs, she took com-
mand of her own forces and drove off the attack-

352 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ing party with loss to them. I was presented
with several volumes written by her, with her
autograph on the title-pages; and the census,
and the vital and other statistics of her State are
admirably compiled, as the volume before me as
I write confirms.

To arrive at your host's railway station after
midnight is awkward for both host and guest as
a rule ; but not so here. Hundreds of troops, and
their oflScers, and forty to fifty European guests
were received and taken care of for this week;
and when I appeared upon the platform at Bho-
pal, I was at once taken in charge by an officer,
who handed me an addressed envelope, telling
me where my quarters were, the hours for meals,
the times of the arrival and departure of mails
and trains, and a programme of the week's do-
ings and entertainments. The Germans could
not have done it better. I was undeservedly
honored by having luxurious quarters in the
bungalow of the Inspector-General.

It was a jolly crowd of officers and their wives
when we met at luncheon and dinner; but it was
a hard-worked lot of men who supervised, um-
pired, and directed the sports, which went on
hour after hour from daylight till dark. Polo,
hockey, running-races, broad and high jumping,
obstacle races, and exercises on the horizontal

A VISITOR'S DIARY 353

and parallel bars, and other games and sports
were included in the programme. When it is
considered that the track was by no means as per-
fect as ours, these records are not bad : Hundred
yards, lOf seconds; mile, 4:50| minutes; three
miles, 15:451 minutes; high jump, 5 ft. 4 in.
As for the obstacle race, it was the severest test
of the kind I have ever seen or heard of. It in-
cluded among other things rope-climbing, in and
out of the windows of a house, a terrible bit of arti-
ficial jungle, a tent to go through, a wooden wall
fifteen feet high, abroad and deep water-jump, and
a long run home. I doubt if our best men at this
game would have a chance against these Indians.

There are men from as far north as Kashmir,
and men from the south, east, and west, and you
realize the vastness, and the differences of races
of India, when you see them here together. Ev-
erything goes smoothly, not a hitch that I saw;
but it must entail a tremendous amount of work
for the British oflBcers, who train the men, super-
intend the meeting, teach fair-play, and whose
cheery authority keeps the peace, without which
there would surely be a dozen riots a day between
these rival bands of different races.

On the last afternoon of the games Her High-
ness presented the prizes, and great was the ap-
plause as the various winners appeared. When

354 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the winning polo team was called, there was some
delay and running about, and at last only two of
the four presented themselves. I learned after-
wards that the other two were at their prayers
when they were called, and refused to be dis-
turbed even by this great honor of receiving prizes
from a Muhammadan ruler. Some of us perhaps
take our devotions thus seriously, but not many,
I fear!

On the last day of the meeting we were in-
vited to the palace for a garden-party, and enter-
tained with music, shooting at clay pigeons, at a
target with the rifle, a sumptuous tea, and pre-
sented when we left with gold and silver tissue
garlands hung round our necks by the hostess,
and atta and pan, the mark of Oriental courtesy,
consisting of sweetmeats and the sprinkling of
our handkerchiefs with perfume. After our final
dinner the Begum drove over with an escort of
lancers, and read us a graceful little speech of
congratulation and farewell.

The next visit to Colonel Daly, the Resident in
charge of the native chiefs of central India, at
Indore, brought the unique pleasure of finding
that my hostess was an American. This proved
a busy centre of activity, and I had the good fort-
une to arrive in time for a meeting of the native
chiefs, interested in the building and management

A VISITOR'S DIARY 355

of the Daly Chiefs' College, named after the
present Resident's father. The masters are care-
fully chosen from the English public schools and
universities; and here too they are bulwarking
education, with training by example, in character
and self -discipline.

The energetic physician of this district, with his
hospitals, dispensaries, training-school for nurses,
bacteriological laboratory, and his students, made
the remark, which I quote as conveying by an apt
illustration my own general impression of Indian
intellectual ability. "The Indian students are
quick and clever," he said; "they have memory.
If told a man has pneumonia, they can rattle
oflf the symptoms, but if told certain symptoms,
they cannot as readily name the disease. They
are poor diagnosticians." They lack the cour-
age which welcomes responsibility, and the con-
fidence which names because it knows, here as
in other departments in which they serve. The
Englishmen are the real vertebrae of India, and
you see it well illustrated here at Indore, at Bho-
pal, and elsewhere.

The Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar Bahadur of
Indore, a neighbor of Colonel Daly, gave me a
day's shooting for black buck; and I have a
twenty-one inch head as a companion for the
wild boar from Patiala. But it is terribly hot on

356 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the plains around Indore where the black buck
roam. Owing to the fact that a rifle went wrong,
and kept missing fire, I was delayed and did the
bulk of my hunting between the hours of eleven
and two. First a motor-car took me out to the
plains, there the Maharaja's shikari met me with
ponies, and after a few miles on the ponies we
mounted a bullock-cart, which is less likely to
frighten the game. First the rifle missed, and
then I missed. Finally a servant went off and
returned with a rifle of the Maharaja, and a per-
fect little weapon it was. I had tired myself, and
probably the shikari, when a buck leaped in the
air, and with a second shot dropped. The first
shot had merely taken a bit of hide off the top of
his shoulders, and as he sprang into the air the
second went through his heart. As in the case of
the boar, I had better luck than my skill deserved,
for the buck had practically jumped into that
second bullet. They are quick, and shy, and
small, these animals, and like so many other
games it looks a lot easier than it is.

At a garden-party given for the chiefs the next
afternoon I saw a variety of costumes, a wealth
of color, and a procession of old-fashioned man-
ners and customs in the persons of the chiefs.
One fine-looking old fellow I can see now. His
whiskers were curled around his ears, a jade-

A VISITOR'S DIARY 357

handled knife was in his belt, and he was followed
wherever he went by three servitors, one carrying
his hookah, another his sword, and the third his
gun. He maintained the state of a time when
every man went armed; just as we still have two
buttons on our coats, at the small of the back,
which are merely the relics of the time when our
fathers buttoned back their coat-tails that they
might both walk and draw their swords more
easily. Other chiefs more modern in costume and
manner played tennis ; some were poor, while one
of them, Colonel Maharaja Sir Madho Rao Sind-
hia, governs the state of Gwalior, twenty-nine
thousand square miles in area, with a popula-
tion of three million five hundred thousand, and
with revenues of four or five millions of dollars.
He is one of the richest, as he is one of the
most conscientious and hard-working princes in
India. My next visit, of only two days, was to
him.

Neither space nor the interest of my readers per-
mit detailed descriptions of this and other visits.
I shall never forget, however, the magnificent
creature who was detailed to meet me at the sta-
tion at Gwalior. He was a good-looking man to
begin with, of slender build and medium height.
His coat was a tight-fitting affair of pale pink
silk, shot with blue, his trousers were skin-tight

358 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and of white linen. A gold-embroidered waist-
coat showed at his throat, and around his neck was
a string of uncut emeralds, all of a size, and each
as big as a pigeon's egg. Around his wrists were
strings of large diamonds, and hanging from the
top of his right ear were three pear-shaped pearls.
He wore the turban peculiar to Gwalior, of scar-
let with a peak in the centre of gold-threaded em-
broidery, and sewn with jewels. What a sight a
great Durbar in India must be when these hun-
dreds of princes and their escorts, all in their
bravest costumes, march past on elephants and
horses! Millions of value in embroideries, in
jewels, in horse and elephant harness, some of
the elephants even, with bangles of precious
stones, silver horn cases for the bullocks, and
gold-embroidered cloths; howdahs of gold and
silver, and gold and silver cannons even; what
barbaric splendor it must be! It was dazzling
enough to have here and there such glimpses of
it as I had.

They were very differently clothed, were the
next gentlemen who entertained me. Colonel
Deare, and the officers of the Eighth Hussars, out
for a week of exercise at manoeuvres, with other
troops in their dusty khaki uniforms, living in
tents, and in the saddle from dawn till dark,
were smart enough in their mess dress at dinner;

A VISITOR'S DIARY 359

but they were more useful-looking than orna-
mental when at work. Those were glorious days
to me, galloping about, and watching the various
arms of the service, artillery, cavalry, and in-
fantry, native and European, at work together.
Who would not be a cavalryman, when two
hundred of them dash from an ambush across
the plains, and swoop down upon the guns ; or a
gunner, when they gallop up, swing around, un-
limber the guns, and begin pounding away ; or an
infantryman prone on the ground ready to blaze
into a line of fire when the enemy is near enough,
or on his feet, bayonet fixed, waiting for the word
to charge! It is these few moments in the life of
the fighting man which make him forget the drab
dreariness of hunger, and thirst, and exposure,
and wounds, and heat, and cold, and prison,
and death, which, after all, make up the warp
and woof of war; those shining minutes of ex-
citement are only the scant embroidery of the
cloth.

They are a sensible race, these Britons! It
was hard work, and dusty, thirsty work they were
doing, and there was no saving of themselves
while doing it; but every comfort that health re-
quires they had in their camp; and though my
taste in such matters may be at fault, I was never
happier during all my stay in India than when

360 THE WEST IN THE EAST

I was living under canvas, with civil or military
oflBcials; roasting if you please at mid-day, and
freezing at midnight; but with just that combina-
tion of hardship and comfort which keeps a man,
a man; and neither a boor on the one hand, nor
a mollycoddle on the other.

I trotted back into Lucknow, through the
crowded streets of the bazaars, to be greeted by
some days of excitement very diflferent from the
sober discipline of the military camp. An un-
usual number of police were about, drawn from
th'^ country districts, and I soon saw that they
were not there without reason. It was the sea-
son of the Mussulman festival of Muharram.

There are two principal sects of Islam, the
Sunis and the Shiahs. The Shiahs are the less
numerous, and the head-quarters of the sect are
in Persia. Lucknow, once the capital of the
Nawabs of Oudh, still celebrates the festival as
an occasion for marking the distinction, because
these Nawabs were of the Shiah sect, and the
Shiahs are still more numerous and powerful
here than in any other part of India.

The first three successors of Muhammad were
selected by the faithful without regard to the
claims of Ali, his son-in-law; and Ali only suc-
ceeded to the fourth vacancy. The two sons of
Ali, Hassan and Hussain, were killed by a rival.

A VISITOR'S DIARY 361

fighting bravely at the battle of Kerbela. The
sect of the Sunis accept the first three; but the
sect of the Shiahs reject them, and look upon the
two sons of All as the great martyrs of their faith.
They were preparing to commemorate this mar-
tyrdom when I returned to Lucknow. When
the day came the whole city, as it seemed to me,
turned itself into a procession. Shrines made of
paper, bamboo and tinsel, some small, carried by
a single person ; others huge affairs, carried by a
dozen men, were borne along, the crowd march-
ing far out into the country, where these shrines
were solemnly interred. Various features of the
tragic history of the death of Hassan and Hussain
are represented during the procession and at the
interment; and every now and again the proces-
sion halted, while an excited orator rehearsed
some portion of the story. They marched, shout-
ing the names of the martyrs, beating their
breasts, throwing dust on their heads, they are
all bareheaded on this occasion, weeping and
wailing. One group carried what looked like
short flails, and to the ends of the cords were tied
knife-blades; these they whirled around their
heads, bringing them down on their shoulders
and backs, which were streaming with blood.

This was not a procession of boys, or of hyster-
ical youths and women, but of grown men, many

362 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of whom were pointed out to me as men of stand-
ing in the community. To see a group of these
men stop, and burst into groans, tears, and wild
cries of grief; to see their breasts bruised, and in
some cases the skin broken, by the beating from
their fists ; to see them covered with blood, dust,
and sweat, their faces haggard, their eyes blazing
with excitement; to hear one of them recite part of
the tale of woe, his eyes streaming with tears and
his voice choked with emotion; and the tale punc-
tuated with wild cries and shrieks and lusty pum-
melling of the breast on the part of his hearers,
while little children and old women threw dust
on their own and each other's heads, is the most
amazing spectacle of religious enthusiasm that
one may see anywhere in the world to-day. This
is the kind of man, this is the quality of human
stuflp, which spread like lava over Arabia, Egypt,
Spain, up to the very gates of France, and burst
through the Afghan passes and conquered India.
One readily understands why. Apparently the
faith is still alive, sincere, and as ready for the
torch to light it against the infidel as ever. They
abhor pig, insist upon the rite of circumcision,
ignore the bondage of caste, and with sword and
crescent crumpled up almost the whole of the
fighting world at one time, declaring : there is one
God, Muhammad is his prophet, and we are the

A VISITOR'S DIARY 363

chosen people, with a paradise of delights await-
ing us as a recompense for our slaughter of the
infidel and the idolater.

One in every five of the population of India is
a Mussulman, and the British King-Emperor
rules over more Mussulmans than even the Sultan
of Turkey. This frenzied crowd is tuned up to a
delicate pitch of excited sectarianism; and their
rivals the Sunis, and the Hindus, generally offer
cause for fighting before the day is over; and
sometimes, as lately in Bombay, actual riots,
which call for the intervention of the police and
the shooting of the rioters. It is hard to believe
that these men, cutting their backs with knives,
and beating their breasts to a pulp with their fists,
over a question of Caliphic succession a thousand
years old, are the fathers and brothers and cous-
ins of the cricket-playing students at Aligarh.
It is hard to believe that those worshippers in the
gloomy temple at Benares are in any way related
to the distinguished and learned judge in the
court at Bombay. It is hard to believe that those
catechists crowding into the Golden Temple at
Amritsar are cousins of the Sikh ruler who knows
his Paris better than most Parisians; harder still
to reconcile the facts that the pink pasteboard
uniformity of Jaipur, and the tawdry architect-
ural decadence of Lucknow, are phases of the

364 THE WEST IN THE EAST

same civilization which built the Pearl Mosque
at Delhi, the Taj at Agra, the great red sandstone
fort of Akbar, and the town of Fatehpur-Sikri.
Only India has the right to be called the land of
contrasts.

IX

JOHN CHINAMAN AND OTHERS

IF tlie only impressions of India one carried
away were received on entering India as the
guest of tlie Governor of Bombay, and on
leaving India as the guest of the Viceroy at Cal-
cutta, and during the six months between as the
guest of English and Indian officials and poten-
tates, the American would have only a tale to
tell of wonders and splendors, and of a hospitality
as kindly as it was brilliant.

But India is a land of "braided light and
gloom." Close beside the beautiful temple are
creatures fantastically deformed; there are no
such exotically magnificent princes, and no such
millions living from hand to mouth; no mortal
succeeds as does the Indian Yogi, who has ac-
quired Yoga or union with the Divinity, in di-
vorcing body and soul, and no other land has
such a swarm, estimated at five million, of beg-
gars; there is no such practical exponent of
peace as the orthodox Jain, no such ruffian as the
untrained Bhil; there is no land, I believe, gov-

365

366 THE WEST IN THE EAST

erned by such self-sacrificing rulers, and ruling
over such ignorant multitudes; there is no land
where you may see a picked man of our race,
soldier, sportsman, administrator, the best we
have produced in short in the matter of man-
hood, and beside him our best expression of
dignified womanhood; and not far away an
Indian fakir naked, painted, covered with dust
and vermin, illustrating the disorderliness of
fanatical ignorance.

I had had some six months of this "braided
light and gloom" when I arrived at Calcutta as
the guest of the Viceroy who had had five years
of it. The Viceroy and the Governors of prov-
inces are not permitted to leave India during their
term of office, and five years of Indian climate
and Indian responsibility is killing work. If
there be faults and mistakes in the administra-
tion of India, India has taken toll in the health
and lives of those who have governed her. Lord
Minto has not taken his duties lightly, and I
can fancy that he looks back upon his daring
feats as a horseman, as to the risks of the nur-
sery, compared to his burdens as Viceroy of
India.

Fast mail steamers and the telegraph, and a
fussy Secretary of State for India, and back of
him the ignorant prying of representatives who

JOHN CHINAMAN 367

wish his administration no good, may make a
present-day governor the most governed man in
the whole dependency he is supposed to govern.
England has produced many men and still pos-
sesses a few, who decline to be governed gov-
ernors. That type of man founded, fought for,
freed, and made both England and America
what they are. You have only to walk about
Calcutta to see that England has, however un-
willingly, let it be known that the unlearned, the
untra veiled, the superficial are in control at
home. Though the working man, why he arro-
gates to himself that title I am always at a loss
to understand, may be getting even more than
his rights at home, his short-sighted shrewdness
there, may be losing him his markets abroad.
Indeed, that is what is actually happening.
They are even now grinding Manchurian wheat
with Chinese labor at Woosung. A steamship
line carries pig-iron from the Yellow River to
Seattle; and they are making shoes at Cawn-
pore with American machinery. Both Peking
and Mukden are to have a water supply. They
are getting on!

Coming as I did from the north of India, the
scarcely veiled impudence, the assertion of
equality and independence, the ugly temper of
the Bengali were not only evident, they were ob-

368 THE WEST IN THE EAST

trusive in Calcutta. Here you see the ullage of
the cask of India, and it is gaseous as might be
expected, and ever ready to be touched into ex-
plosiveness.

There can be nothing more dangerous in deal-
ing with a population such as this, than to give
the impression that the man sent to rule has a
string tied to him, which may be jerked from
London. I have no means of knowing whether
this supposition is true or not true; but that it
is firmly believed by the Indian politicians and
their followers there is no doubt; and that it puts
the ruler in a cruelly embarrassing position goes
without saying. Lord Minto's administration
has nevertheless persisted in reforms, persisted
in the optimistic view, and resisted the tempta-
tion to panicky repression; but that is because
Lord Minto himself is a brave man.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Indian
only recognizes readily power that is autocratic
and personified in one man. When that power
is interfered with from unknown sources it con-
fuses him, and his violence is as often as not
the result of his confusion. If the British Gov-
ernment does not trust the viceroy suflaciently
to let him alone, the Indians will go still further,
as they have done, and throw stones at his motor-
car, and then bombs at himself and his wife, and

JOHN CHINAMAN 369

the six hundred members of Parliament are
more to blame than the three hundred millions
of India. If one reads Morley's " Life of Burke,"
with its bitter attacks upon Clive and Hastings,
one may find therein, though it be far distant, not
a little light thrown upon certain phases of recent
Indian administration. I can speak with au-
thority only upon one matter. Of the hospital-
ity dispensed at Government House, and at Bar-
rackpur, the country residence of the Viceroy, I
may write with the pleasantest memories; and
in candor rather than in compliment one must
congratulate the English people that they have a
woman to send abroad, as the consort of the
representative of their king, so queenly in. man-
ner and appearance, as their representative who
was my hostess in Calcutta.

Calcutta with its million inhabitants, its large
seaport trade, its public buildings, fine clubs,
and beautiful race-course, perhaps the best-
equipped in the world, even the garden-party I
attended, given by the Lieutenant-Governor, with
the variety of costumes and races assembled
there, proved to me how soon the eye becomes
dulled and the interest languorous. I had seen
so much, that Calcutta seemed commonplace,
though I know well that it is not. What the
experienced Anglo-Indians, on the ship which

370 THE WEST IN THE EAST

carried us to India, told me of Bombay, and
which my unaccustomed eyes found to be quite
untrue, in Bombay, I experienced in Calcutta.
The strange features and figures, the moving
mass of color were dulled by the film of ex-
perience which had grown over my eyes. It
may be too that months of travel, where both
mind and body are travelling, and where the
experiences are novel and the contrasts so strik-
ing; where one shifts from a palace to a tent,
and from philosophy to pig-sticking all within
a few hours, teach the impression-receiving parts
of mind and body to defend themselves by be-
coming more opaque. It was almost with a sigh
of relief that I dropped into my deck-chair early
one morning on the steamer, on my way to
Rangoon.

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder, outer'

China 'cros't the bay.

It is getting on toward April, and the moist
heat, even lolling on the deck of a moving
steamer, makes pulp of a man ; only the mosqui-
toes make him realize his manhood. Mosquitoes
have their place in the world. It is their func-
tion to prove to man that no discomfort is com-

JOHN CHINAMAN 371

plete without them. I was even too lackadaisi-
cal to do more than to smile weakly, when the
menu of the first day's luncheon informed me
that the only hot dish was grilled pork chops,
British gastronomies undefiled! Add to this
kind of fare the mental pabulum of a loquacious
and facetious skipper, and you have a ship
which christens herself the "Emetic," whatever
her name registered at Lloyd's may be.

Whether it was because I had just left the
sombreness of India, the contrast with Burma
was aU in Burma's favor. I have chatted with
Indians who laughed and joked, with others who
had a certain dreamy humor, but India as a
whole, as a composite, leaves the impression of
being solemn and sullen. There is more laugh-
ter and gayety in Rangoon in one afternoon than
in all India in a week. The Burmese are the
Parisians of the East. As I look back from a
distance, India seems sober even to suUenness;
Burma gay and bright; Japan eager, curious,
superficial; and the Chinese, strange to say,
though proud and indifferent, the forceful and
competent people of the East. Sir Robert Hart
writes of them: "Pride of race, pride of intel-
lect, pride of civilization, pride of supremacy,
in its massive and magnificent setting of bliss-
ful ignorance." Once they break through this

372 THE WEST IN THE EAST

shell of satisfied ignorance, and take to modern
methods of agriculture, commerce, and warfare,
the East will come into her own again indeed.
Just now, we are hearing much of Asia for the
Asiatics, with Japan in control of the movement.
The little boy Japan may have this huge yel-
low puppy at the end of a string now, but there
will be some awful tumbles for him when the
puppy grows up.

The Chinese are very much in evidence where-
ever one goes, all the way round the coast from
Calcutta via Rangoon, Penang, Singapore, Hong-
kong, and as far east and north as the borders
of Russian Asia. He is industrious, often pros-
perous, sometimes rich. Here in Burma he is
a favorite in the matrimonial market, as he is
all through the East. He may not appeal to
us as a lady's man exactly, but he is greatly
fancied by the Burmese, and the women all
through the Straits Settlements and elsewhere.
He supports his wife which is considered a negli-
gible duty by both the Burmese and the Malays.
In Rangoon with a population of 230,000 there
are 77,000 Hindus, 40,000 Muhammadans, and
some 15,000 Chinese. Like the Parsis in Bom-
bay they seem much more numerous than they
are. Certain races have the faculty of multiply-
ing their visibility. It is almost impossible to

JOHN CHINAMAN 373

believe that there are less than a million Jews in
America, and less than eleven million in all the
world; and much the same is true of the Parsis
in India. By their industry, their clannishness,
their pre-eminence in all matters dealing with
money, their facility in adapting themselves
to the rapid changes in the financial and com-
mercial temperature, they have won for them-
selves a prominence out of all proportion to their
numbers. The Chinese emigrants in Burma
and elsewhere in the Far East show something
of the same qualities. They are the money-
changers, and the trusted handlers of money
in the banks, offices, and commercial houses
throughout the Far East, and even to a limited
extent in Japan.

There is no caste system, no seclusion of the
women in Burma, and they seem a happy, lazy,
color-loving lot, short and thick-set in build, with
a certain flatness of feature that marks their
kinship to the Mongolian. The men wear their
hair long, and are without hair on their faces;
and the women are shopkeepers and are seen
everywhere, in the streets and bazaars and at
the temples, free and busy, and judging from
their expression, light-hearted, marking a change
and making a change in the street life, from that
of India, as from beetles to butterflies.

374 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Every civilization in the East is old as we
mark the passage of time, but as compared with
the others, India seems rather aged than old.
These merry people in Burma, the busy people
in Japan, the industrious and cheerful Chinese,
all seem young by comparison. In this rich soil
and overwhelming vegetation, in this land of
jade and amber and rubies and teak-wood, with
its twenty million acres of forests of all kinds
of valuable hard-woods, with its eleven thousand
acres of rice fields, getting a living is not a difl&-
cult matter; and the Burmese men, at any rate,
scorn superfluous industry.

Here too is the home of Buddhism, pagodas
and monasteries are everywhere, and so far as my
experience goes, everywhere the monks are affa-
ble and hospitable. To build a new pagoda is
a charity deemed by the Burmese to be an act
more sure of reward in the future life than any
other; while to repair an old pagoda carries no
weight at all with those who mete out salva-
tion. As a consequence pagodas with their
fringes of bells, and their umbrella tops, dot
every hillside and every conspicuous bit of land-
scape.

Every Burmese is supposed to shave his head,
don the saffron-colored robe, and become a
monk for a certain time, which accounts for the

JOHN CHINAMAN 375

very youthful appearance and the rather merry
holiness of many of the neophytes whom I met.
The monks are supported by the voluntary
contributions of the people, and in return they
constitute themselves the school-teachers of the
land. The monasteries are as a rule built upon
piles, and are always of one story, since it is con-
sidered derogatory to a priest that any one shall
live above him. I was told that the population
is more superstitious than Buddhistic in feeling.
The spirits of rivers, mountains and forests,
called Nats, are continually and carefully propi-
tiated by most of the people who, not differing
greatly from disciples of what are deemed higher
forms of religion, are more conspicuous in their
loyalty to the powers that be, than obedient to
the mandates of the unseen and distant. We
might ourselves conceive of the powers of nature
as worthy of worshipful reverence if we lived in
Rangoon, where the rainfall averages ninety
inches per annum.

The good folk of Boston may be disturbed to
learn that in the palace at Mandalay there is a
high seven-storied gilded spire over the throne,
which the Burmese claim is the centre of the
imiverse, or ^'ir4)aXo<! yrj<;, as they would phrase
it in Boston. Not being a Bostonian, I made
no comment, but I make no doubt the Burmese

376 THE WEST IN THE EAST

would recognize the absurdity of their pretension
if the rival claim were properly presented.

What Taine wrote of certain of the gaudier
churches of Italy: "Des casinos a 1' usage des
cervelles imaginatives," is not a mere rhetorical
slur, but a better description than any that I
can give of these pagoda temples of Burma.
While in Rangoon I spent most of my time in
the bazaars and in the precincts of the great
Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Monks, nuns, priests,
shopkeepers, jugglers, peddlers and pilgrims
were coming and going there all day. No ca-
sino in Europe can show a greater variety of
visitors. This pagoda is said to contain actual
relics of Buddha, and pilgrims come from all
over the Eastern world, from India, Siam, Korea,
to worship here. I saw Hindus, Siamese, Jap-
anese, Koreans, Chinese there, all in one morn-
ing; and the sick and diseased carried in chairs
and litters, from what far-off regions I know not,
were there too. It was almost painful to see the
excitement, the awe, the scared expression on the
faces of some of the pilgrims, as they made their
way slowly, and with frequent obeisances, tow-
ard the shrine; while others listen with wonder
in their eyes, as a guide describes glibly the
meaning of the frescoes on the beams and panels
of the wooden roofs, which cover the long stairs.

JOHN CHINAMAN 377

They have not been weaned from an abject
belief in God in the East, and I am not sure that
this is not the real cleavage between us. There
must be a mighty difference between the races
who believe in God and the races who invent
Him.

If the reader will look at a map, he will see
that the Bay of Bengal, which is a part of the
Indian Ocean really, which reaches up between
Ceylon and India on the west, and the Straits
Settlements, Siam and Burma on the east, has
two ports, Ceylon and Singapore, at each end
roughly of the surrounding land. These two
ports are the switch-boards for all the going and
coming between East and West. Ten thousand
vessels, with a tonnage of over ten million tons,
come and go here at Singapore in a year, and
some fifteen thousand native craft besides.
Bound north or south, east or west, you start
from, or change, or call in passing, at Ceylon or
at Singapore, and if it be Singapore, as in my
case, when you get there you can almost step off
on to the equator.

Why that imaginary line attracts so much at-
tention is hard to explain. Twice when I have
crossed it, we were all eager to know just when
we should cross, as though we expected a bump
or jar of some sort; and the passengers on the

S78 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Tara which carried us from Rangoon to Singa-
pore seemed to feel that nearness to the equator
added in some way to one's dignity.

To those who only read of the plague as a de-
vouring monster too distant for menace to one-
self, it is startling to be obliged to appear before
a doctor for examination before embarking, and
to be threatened with a heavy fine by the au-
thorities at Singapore, if one fails to appear regu-
larly each day, for a certain number of days, to
assure the health ofiicer that one is not carrying
about the germs of disease. Evidently warnings
were out all along the coast, that the monster
was preparing for the outbreak, which some six
months later began its ravages in Manchuria.
Even a strong man looks at his tongue, feels his
pulse, watches his appetite for those few days of
examination, with absorbing and anxious in-
terest.

At Singapore with its two hundred and thirty
thousand inhabitants, of whom all but some ten
thousand are Asiatics, one touches the fringe of
China and the Chinese. The area of China is
one-third the whole of Asia and half as large
again as all Europe, and the population of
China is half that of all Asia and about equal
to the total population of Europe. No wonder
they spill over all along these coasts, and the

JOHN CHINAMAN 379

traveller realizes that the Chinese are a migratory
people, and so far as one can see a welcome ad-
dition to the working population everywhere.

There are large communities of Chinese at
Cholen, Penang, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong-
kong, and at Rangoon, Mandalay, Batavia, and
Manila. They become not only the shop-
keepers and retailers, but they manage steam-
ships, own mines and mills, and even supply cap-
ital for joint-stock companies. There are more
Chinese than Malays in the Malay States ; there
are some three millions of them in Siam; they
are the preponderating power in French Cochin-
China and Tonking, and out of a population
of 320,000 in Hongkong 310,000 are Chinese;
while in the Philippine Islands, despite the
Chinese Exclusion Act, applied to the Philip-
pines in 1902, there are some 50,000 Chinese in
the islands, and 25,000 Americans and Euro-
peans.

Given the opportunity afforded by equal laws,
fair taxation, absence of "squeeze," the short
name for ofl&cial embezzlement, and they become
in other countries not merely hard-working and
economically living coolies, but merchants, ship-
owners, owners and workers of mines, bankers,
and rank in their commercial integrity with the
best. All over the Far East, and wherever in

380 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the West we have deahngs with the Chinese,
there is nothing but praise of their punctilious
honesty and honor as traders. They are a peo-
ple of great physical adaptability. All climates
seem to suit them and they are equally at home in
Siberia, in India, in South America, or in Can-
ada; and even in the days before American con-
trol, when Panama was a death-trap, they went
there.

The Malay is a gentleman, a gentleman of the
kind described by an English groom: "'Ad hall
the hinstincts of a gentleman, 'unts, wears a top-
'at, and lives hout 'Eadingly way!" The Ma-
lay loves idleness and fine clothes, and upsets
the dictum of Voltaire completely: "Le repos est
une bonne chose, mais I'ennui est son frere," for
he is apparently never tired or bored by idleness.
I suppose somewhere and sometimes he works,
but in the few days I was in and about Singa-
pore, I never detected him in any form of useful
activity. Perhaps the women support the men;
at all events the Malays have asserted the primi-
tive rights of man, and it is the men who strut
in the fine feathers. To see a Malay in a hy-
brid costume of East and West with a bowler
hat on the side of his head, and a cigar in the
comer of his mouth, taking the air of an even-
ing drawn by a sweating Chinese, is to see an

JOHN CHINAMAN 381

economic puzzle indeed. How he procures the
wherewithal, and how he asserts his right to ride,
is a mystery hidden away beneath the bowler
hat. Even my English friend, with a rubber
plantation in the interior, could give no satis-
factory explanation.

It is the Chinese who do all the work. A
Chinese in the shafts of a jinrickishaw trundled
me to the hotel at Singapore, a Chinese showed
me to my room, a Chinese waited on me in the
dining-room, and a Chinese made me at home
when I wandered into the Singapore Club.

I have tested my own training and traditions,
my principles and my prejudices carefully, and I
believe honestly, but I can give no reason better
than mere instinct for my racial likes and dis-
likes. To me the Chinese are by far the most
agreeable people in the East, but I should find
it hard to give any comprehensive analysis of
Indians, Malays, Burmese, Japanese, Koreans,
and Chinese to account for this preference. I
know them to be cruel, lecherous, wily, rapacious,
and of abounding patience in what we consider
wrong-doing, and notwithstanding all that, I
seem to detect something virile and independent
about them; some quality of playing the game
the way we play it, that is lacking in the others.

Almost every afternoon when it got cool enough

382 THE WEST IN THE EAST

for a walk, I wended my way down the long
street by the water-front, till I came to the
swarming Chinese quarter, and there I watched
them buying, selling, gambling, eating, and
sleeping. The coolies eat in the street. There
is a long row of out-of-door restaurants consist-
ing of a long table, with benches on three sides,
and piles of food and bowls and chop-sticks.
The proprietor fills the bowl of his customer
with steaming rice, adds bits of dried fish, and
vegetables, and perhaps puppy-meat, — and why
not, since Hippocrates himself held that the
flesh of puppies was equal to that of birds, —
and then begins a race between the appetite and
the chop-sticks, aptly called "nimble-sons,"
which would do credit to an accomplished pres-
tidigitator.

One fat old Chinese boniface, behind one of
these restaurant tables, in his blue night-gown
costume, and jaunty wide-awake hat, two sizes
too small for him, on his head, used to grin ap-
preciatively at me, and no doubt cracked all
sorts of jokes at my expense with his gobbling
guests, to judge from his winks to them and at
me, and the smiles and chatter that followed.
If I had been sure of my digestion, I should have
joined the party, just for the jollity and good-
fellowship.

JOHN CHINAMAN 383

Better-informed travellers than I, have re-
marked upon this Chinese characteristic of
cheerfulness, their tolerance of disagreeable
things, their invincible contentment, their good-
humor under every kind of discomfort, and
under the severest bodily toil ; as one writer puts
it: "They seem to have acquired a national habit
of looking upon the bright side." After the
listlessness, the lack of physical endurance, the
furtive impudence of the southern Indians,
the Chinese struck me as being positively jolly.
That this is a racial trait is evidenced by the
difference between the Ghurkhas in India, who
are reaUy Mongolians, and all other Indians.
They too love a joke, a good story, and are
invincibly cheerful, and many Englishmen say,
the best soldiers in India. If this be true, one
wonders why some day the Chinese may not
recover from their present classification of
human value, which puts the scholar first, the
farmer next, the artisan next, and the mer-
chant and the soldier last; and give the man of
action his proper place in the social hierarchy.

It is all very well to dream as long as dreams
are not your master; all very well to think so
long as thoughts are not your aim, as Kipling
well says; for neither dreams nor thoughts are
more than glistening colored bubbles unless they

384 THE WEST IN THE EAST

be translated into belief and action. When one
sees Chinese school-boys of all ages drilling and
marching and carrying real guns; when one sees
a well-equipped mountain-battery out for exer-
cise and practice, as I did, one gets a notion
that the Chinese are indeed making ready for
action. The great wall of China was begun
before the Christian era and was building for
seventeen hundred years, but the Chinese move
more quickly now.

Unfortunately for my plans, the Chinese on
the Yangtse River were indulging in a mo-
mentary dislike of missions and missionaries,
and translating their prejudices into murders and
bonfires, just at the time that I arrived in Hong-
kong. The Yangtse River is navigable by bat-
tle-ships for two hundred and thirty miles, or
as far up as Nanking, and as far as Han-Kow
by vessels of considerable size, and is the Missis-
sippi River trade route of China. It takes its
rise in the far-off mountains of Thibet, and is
some three thousand miles in length, and navi-
gable for about two thousand miles. Instead of
going from Hongkong to Shanghai, and then up
this great Yangtse River to Han-Kow, and then
across country to Peking, I was obliged to leave
this interesting journey for more peaceful times.
I suppose a civilization cutting its teeth, on the

JOHN CHINAMAN 385

way from one stage of growth to another, must
necessarily behave in a fretful and sometimes
violent manner ; and just at the time I was
wondering and dreaming over the possibility of
a Chinese nation armed and in action, a fraction
of the population turned to breaking heads and
burning meeting-houses, forcing the authorities
to refuse permission to travellers to journey in
that direction.

To those of us who know something of the be-
havior of the European troops during the Boxer
troubles, of the cruelties of Cossacks and Jap-
anese and others ; of the killing of men, women
and children; of the rifling of graves, and the
breaking open of coffins to get at the money that
the Chinese bury with their dead, and the use
of these coffins as dining-tables ; to those of us
who know these things, there is little excuse to
be made, and small reason for surprise when the
Chinese indulge in similar atrocities. Perhaps
there is something of the Tartar in all of us when
we are scratched deep enough. What the Chi-
nese saw of us on our way to relieve Peking was
not calculated to impress them with our gen-
tleness, our honesty, or our qualifications to pose
as examples of a higher form of civilization.

For my personal acquaintance with the Chi-
nese, I was obliged, therefore, to content myself

386 THE WEST IN THE EAST

with what I saw of them along the coast, and at
Hongkong, Canton, and in Manchuria.

I know of nothing more destructive of the
sense of proportion than a map unaccompanied
by a time-table. It was three weeks or more
before I reached Hongkong from Calcutta, a
journey which looks much shorter on the map.
But steamers do not always connect to suit one's
personal itinerary, and where they do there may
be no accommodation for the pilgrim, who travels
not according to Cook but as his fancy dictates.

Hongkong in the language of diplomacy was
ceded: in plain English, was taken, in 1842, by
the British from the Chinese. Whether the
quarrel was a matter of opium trading, or of
unwarranted aggression on the part of the Chi-
nese, does not concern us here, and had best
be left to the limbo of academic discussion. At
all events British governing here has accom-
plished what both the Chinese and the British
may well be proud to show to the rest of the
world. Sixty years ago it was a convenient nest
for the daring Cantonese pirates; and then, as
still to-day, the Cantonese were reckoned the
most turbulent, restless, and daring population
in all China.

What Sir William des Voeux, a former gov-
ernor, writes of Hongkong is all true, and the

JOHN CHINAMAN 387

description might be even more brightly colored
without exaggeration. "Long lines of quays
and wharves, large warehouses teeming with
merchandise, shops stocked with all the luxuries,
as well as the needs of two civilizations; in the
European quarter a fine town-hall, stately banks,
and other buildings of stone; in the Chinese
quarter houses, constructed after a pattern pecu-
liar to China, of almost equally solid materials,
but packed so closely together and thronged so
densely as to be in this respect probably without
parallel in the world (one hundred thousand peo-
ple live within a certain district not exceeding
half a square mile in area), and finally streets
stretching for miles, abounding with carriages
(drawn for the most part not by animals but by
men), and teeming with a busy population, in
the centre of the town chiefly European, but
toward the west and east almost exclusively
Chiuese. , . . And when it is further remembered
that the Chinese, whose labor and enterprise
under British auspices have largely assisted in
this development, have been under no com-
pulsion, but have come here as free men, at-
tracted by liberal institutions, equitable treat-
ment, and the justice of our rule; when all this
is taken into account, it may be doubted whether
the evidences of material and moral achieve-

388 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ment, presented as it were in a focus, make any-
where a more forcible appeal to eye and imagi-
nation." What the English have accomplished
here and elsewhere; what we Americans have
done in improving the Philippine Islands, and
the almost fairy-like change that has been
wrought by the American army engineers and
surgeons in the canal district at Panama, stand
out as imperishable monuments, not merely of
our honorable intentions, but of our unequalled
eflBciency as altruistic governors of alien peoples
and of strange lands. Nor Rome, nor any
modern power, can point to such colossal suc-
cesses in brotherly helpfulness, untainted by
even the suspicion of corruption.

It was my privilege to travel across Siberia
with the present Governor of Hongkong, Sir
Frederick Lugard. He told me something of
his plans for a university at Hongkong. Sir
Frederick is the kind of advocate of peace in
whom one believes. Bearing many wounds as
the result of his soldiering, and of his successful
campaigns for peace and orderliness in Uganda,
he is now fostering the splendid peace plan of
an international university at Hongkong.

Why does not some American of wealth, who
believes in peace rather than in self-advertising,
give a handsome sum of money for the founda-

JOHN CHINAMAN 389

tion of one or more chairs to be filled by Ameri-
can professors in this university, which is al-
ready under way, the foundation-stone having
been laid last year? An American chair of
History of Commerce, or of Ethnic Religions, to
be filled, say two years at a time, by a lecturer
chosen from among the many American scholars
who are interested in furthering a better under-
standing between the East and the West; this
would be a worthy gift indeed from the American
nation, which has already assured the Chinese
of our belief in fair-play by the generous return
to China of an overpayment for losses during
the Boxer uprising. The Chinese have been no
less gracious to us. China sent her first general
Embassy to foreign countries in 1868. Her "En-
voy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary "
was the Hon. Anson Burlingame, accompanied
by two Chinese, who appear as "Associated High
Envoys and Ministers." The wording of the
United States Treaty of 1868, and the diplomatic
correspondence at the time, show, therefore, that
China confided to an American the task of
framing new treaties, and of representing her in
the delicate negotiations dealing with her rela-
tions with foreign nations.

As early as 1785 we sent a trading-ship to
China, and the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury saw, what the Chinese still call our country.

390 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the "flowery flag," on the fastest sailing-ships
afloat, in Chinese ports. By the Treaty of
Washington in 1868 we disclaimed all intention
of interfering in Chinese affairs, and down to
this present time we have taken the attitude of
fair-play as between other nations and China,
and what is more to the point, of fair-play for
China as well. Such a gift would not only be
a direct and permanent means of promoting that
sympathetic understanding which makes for
peace, but it would be at the same time another
link between the one hundred and forty millions
of us who speak the English language. The
gift of half a million dollars for such a purpose
would mean that the voice of America's picked
scholarship would be heard for generations by
the chosen students of China. That would be
indeed worth while.

I was intending to write of four aspects of
Hongkong which won my interest. First, of
course, of her neighbor Canton ; then of the un-
equalled collection of Chinese porcelain of Sir
Paul Chater; next of the charm of the "Peak,"
and then of Sir Frederick Lugard, and his plans
for an international university now under way.
It is significant that the university plan ran
away with my pen first, as soon as I found
myself writing of Hongkong; and I should
consider it a year's hard travel, and hard work

JOHN CHINAMAN 391

well paid for, if one of my many countrymen,
with the means at his command, should be
tempted to pledge America's co-operation in this
wise method of linking East and West together
in the only bonds that are lasting, those of in-
tellectual sympathy and mutual understanding.

The "Peak," so called, in Hongkong is the
hill overlooking the harbor, which has been
sown and planted till it is the garden as well as
the residential part of the town. A funicular
railway lifts you to the top, and once there, par-
ticularly of a starlight night, with the hundreds
of lights twinkling on the vessels in the harbor
below; for it is one of the great harbors of the
world, and one constantly filled with craft of all
kinds; the picture takes its place, and remains
in the memory, alongside the wonderful harbor
at Rio de Janeiro ; the harbor at San Francisco ;
and the fabulous and mythical aspect of New
York harbor, with its extortionate demands upon
credulity, when one sees the high buildings
looming behind the Statue of Liberty, at dusk
or at dawn.

Whatever may be the gastronomic limitations
of the stewards of the steamship lines in this
quarter of the world. Sir Paul Chater is not
hampered by them. I will not say that his
luncheon was equal to the treasures of porce-

392 THE WEST IN THE EAST

lain which he showed me, but it was in keeping
with them. For years he has been buying and
sifting, and with all China knowing that he
stood ready as a purchaser of anything rare and
beautiful. As a result his collection of Chinese
porcelains is to other collections, whether public
or private, as are the prints of a college fresh-
man to the engravings in the British Museum.
And what a revelation of the Chinese it is, to see
here these wonders of their deftness, their purity
of style, their feeling for color, in their days of
artistic supremacy, in the middle of the seven-
teenth century,

A people of such industry, of such cheerfulness,
of such endurance, of such commercial and ar-
tistic prowess: how is it, one asks oneself, that
they remain so behind in the competitive race of
the nations .'' The honesty and uprightness of
Chinese merchants and bankers is as prover-
bial throughout the world as is the shiftiness
and untrustworthiness of the Japanese of the
same class; while on the other hand, the oflScial
corruption in China spreads throughout the land
like a gangrene, eating away at all national en-
terprises, and maiming the industrial hands and
feet, in every effort to move.

This strange difference between the commer-
cial code and the official code in China is

JOHN CHINAMAN 393

confusing. The merchant's word is as good
as his bond, while the official all over China
lives openly upon "squeeze." No government
official is intended to, or can possibly live upon,
his pay. The old-time, and by far the easiest,
method for an autocratic rule is to farm out the
taxes, to demand a certain sum of the officials
appointed, and to leave it to them to get what
they can for themselves. This was once the
way in India and in Japan, and later in Rome
and in France. Indeed, the historical memory
need not be long to recall the days when the
British House of Commons was bought and
sold like a flock of sheep; and the ominous
growl: "To the victors belong the spoils" is still
heard, though sotto voce, in America to-day.

I suppose there is no business man in our
country who would not jump at the chance to
take over our post-office department, with its ex-
clusive privileges, prepared to make a fortune.

It is no doubt honestly conducted, so far as
pilfering is concerned, but the offices and officials
therein are all political spoils. The tenure is
uncertain, there is no reward for efficiency, and
no temptation to work harder than bare neces-
sity requires. There is no barefaced "squeeze,"
but the government is cheated all over the coun-
try by perfunctory labor, by skimped hours of

394 THE WEST IN THE EAST

work, and by the lack of enthusiasm of those
who feel themselves to be working for a soulless
monster with no means and no intention of re-
warding personal efficiency and devotion. In a
fashion, we farm out to the victorious political
party this opportunity to repay its adherents
and its workers, and waste enormous sums on
what is practically mortpay. No one doubts
for a moment that if our post-office department
were managed as is the Pennsylvania Rail-
road, for example, with every employee chosen
and kept and rewarded for efficiency and ability,
there would be dividends instead of deficits.

We need not, therefore, throw up our hands
in horror at the Chinese. In an attenuated, but
still perceptible form, the philosophy of Chinese
"squeeze" exists to-day in the bureaucracy of
every government in Europe and in the Ameri-
cas. What Chinese gentlemen would think of
the petty and contemptible pilfering of "Favors,"
which is a feature of every fashionable cotillon
in our country, the more flagrant the more val-
uable the "Favors," is best left unanswered.

China is the more easily the victim of this
political malady in a virulent form because its
capital at Peking is not centrally situated, rail-
ways are few, good roads unknown, the post-
office a negligible quantity; and consequently

JOHN CHINAMAN 395

outside the territory just around Peking the
officials of the vast Empire are under little or no
supervision or restraint.

One has only to see something of these vast
stretches of territory without railroads, without
telegraph offices, and with few post-offices to
learn how much we owe to our own railroads
for their efficiency as moral agents. Leaving
out of the count any question of commerce, the
United States to-day would be a great federal
political and moral chaos without its railroads;
and yet I have never heard them alluded to
even as having any ethical value. It is right to
debate these questions whether in a republic or
in China. The value of the debate, however,
depends altogether upon the tone and temper
of the discussion. I believe in insurgency. In-
surgency is the only political or social purgative
of any value in a democracy; but the insurgent
must be neither a fanatic nor a fakir; he is, alas,
all too often one or the other; and America
has suffered of late from a veritable plague of
left-handed Catos. Therefore, I counsel my
readers to adopt my method. As an observer,
as a traveller, as a student, I know of no instru-
ment of criticism so helpful as sympathy. You
must like a man to get out of him the best he
has to give. Mere denunciation is a weapon of

396 THE WEST IN THE EAST

the ethical age, of the eocene lemur, and the
calcareous sponge.

If the Chinese cure themselves of this disease
of official peculation it is hard to set a limit to
their national or commercial progress. The
Abbe Hue writes: "The Chinese is born with
this taste for traffic, which grows with his growth
and strengthens with his strength. The first
thing a child looks for is a sapeck ; the first use
that he makes of his speech and intelligence is
to learn to articulate the names of coins; when
his little fingers are strong enough to hold the
pencil, it is with making figures that he amuses
himself, and as soon as the tiny creature can
speak and walk he is capable of buying and
selling. The Chinese has a passionate love of
lucre; he is fond of all kinds of speculations and
stock-jobbing, and his mind, full of finesse and
cunning, takes delight in combining and calcu-
lating the chances of a commercial operation."

The shrewdest comment ever made upon the
methods of our Stock Exchange was made by a
Chinese. Prince Li Hung Chang was escorted
to Wall Street, and in a certain broker's office
he was shown a "ticker" machine rolling off the
prices of stocks. It was expected by his host
that he would be astonished, if not bewildered,
at these financial heart-beats made visible on a

JOHN CHINAMAN 397

strip of paper. When asked what he thought of
it, he replied: "I think I should prefer to play
in a game where I can see the cards shuffled."

A few hours by steamer from Hongkong, upon
the Canton River, brings one to China as we pict-
ure China to ourselves; for Canton contains all
the materials, from pig-tails to puppies, which
supply the Western imagination with its notions
of the Chinese. Canton is surrounded by a wall
six or seven miles in circumference, and is filled,
literally filled, if the eye is to be trusted, with a
population of something under a million. You
settle yourself in a sedan-chair borne by four
coolies, and you are carried swiftly through the
narrrow streets, nowhere more than seven feet
wide, and the noise and the smells and the
traffic and the sights and scenes are so numb-
ing, that one sympathizes with the man who
found himself with so much to do that he went
a-fishing. It is as impossible at first to make
out what this swarm of people are doing as to
disentangle the activities of an ant-hill.

The river itself is thronged with boats upon
which thousands of families live from one
year's end to the other. Some of them even have
small plots of earth on them, in which seeds are
planted, and very few of them lack chickens and
dogs and babies; and a net let down into one

398 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of those family gondolas would bring up the
strangest and most ill-assorted catch that ever
fisherman landed.

The girl babies must have but a small chance
in this land of infanticide, with a watery grave
so convenient. Who has ever heard the mem-
bers of a family even at home say : yes, we have
a new baby, if that baby is a boy; or neglect to
proclaim: yes, we have a new baby boy! In
China they carry this prepossession in favor of
the male, as they do still to some extent in India
and Japan, to its cruel logical conclusion. In
the Chinese characters or ideographs used for
writing, a woman with a lid on her is the word
for Quiet, while three women together is the
ideograph for Noise. In this swarming life, the
girl who must have a dot when she marries, and
who is incompetent to carry on the worship of
the ancestors, which alone in China is the uni-
versal form of worship prescribed and accepted,
is often looked upon as an inconvenient burden,
and if so widely recognized an authority as the
Rev. Arthur H. Smith is to believed, is often dis-
posed of by murder.

Both here and later I came into contact with
a number of the better-class Chinese, as their
guest or as a fellow-guest. They are much
easier in their manners, more composed and self-

JOHN CHINAMAN 399

reliant, more dignified, than either the Indians
or the Japanese. Even a European of standing
and social experience might find it a trying or-
deal to be the only one of his race present, say
at a dinner where all the other guests were Chi-
nese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians. On one
occasion, at a meal where fourteen of us were
present, there was one Chinese, but no one there
was more at his ease, more agreeable, or better
mannered than he; and I should add that he
spoke no English, and had never travelled far
out of his own country. He is the one Oriental,
except a few of the great Indian nobles, who
seems quite unembarrassed, quite sure of his
social and racial position, and who gives no evi-
dence, either by awkward bumptiousness or by
sycophancy, that he is ill at ease.

The traveller who only sees the Chinese in this
swarming human ant-hill at Canton, or in similar
crowded colonies elsewhere, gets little notion of
the superior qualities of the race. While those
who only see the Chinese coolies in the various
Chinatowns of the Western world; who read of
plague and famine and of attacks upon mission-
aries; who have heard of the terrible Taiping
rebellion led by Hung Hsien-Chuen, a Christian
convert, and which was first a religious and then
a political crusade in which twenty million lives

400 THE WEST IN THE EAST

were lost; who remember the Boxer trouble,
and its terrors, have as false an idea of China
and the Chinese as the English village laborer
has of America, who believes it to be a land of
conflagrations, railroad accidents, divorces, lynch-
ings and blatant millionaires whose chief exercise
consists in throwing their daughters at British
peers in the hope of bagging their coronets.

For example, it is a universally held belief in
the West that the smells in China are almost
weighable. This is true, because, as here in
Canton, there is no effort at sanitation except in
the European quarter. But the Chinese them-
selves do not smell; on the contrary they smell
us, and find the odor most disagreeable. We
eat strong food, and many of us drink strong
drinks; the Chinese do not. On the hottest
day, in a room filled with Chinese, there is no
disagreeable odor from their persons. No one
with a wholesome and unprejudiced sense of
smell can say as much for us.

It is, I must confess, unpleasant to see in their
markets dogs trussed up and ready to sell, and
cat meat, rat meat, hawks and other unpalata-
ble birds, reptiles and animals and eggs dating
back to a former dynasty, and cakes of fried
grasshoppers offered as food. A Chinese, on the
other hand, might well be shocked at the external

JOHN CHINAMAN 401

decorations of our butcher-shops at Christmas
time, when we express our good-will to men by
devouring a greater variety of animal food, both
wild and tame, than at other times; he might
also suggest, in these days when speculation has
entered the funereal field of cold storage, that
whether eggs or butter or fish or chickens date
from the reign of Taft or Roosevelt or Cleveland,
or from Tai-tsung of the Tang dynasty, who
edited the Chinese classics in two hundred thou-
sand volumes a thousand years ago, is merely a
matter of taste, he himself preferring the Tai-
tsung vintage to a later one.

We have a way of putting our Western moral
and mental machinery inside the Oriental body,
and then of mapping out the probable processes
of development accordingly. There is no surer
way of arriving at false conclusions. Not long
ago I read an article in one of our magazines in
which the writer said: "Within eighteen months
China will have a parliament or a revolution."
This is the typical journalese bosh of those who
are satisfied to make a sensation by turning the
epitaphs of truth into head-lines. The Chinese
never do anything in so short a time as eighteen
months, and they are, moreover, profoundly sus-
picious of those who do. We ourselves just now,
both at Washington and in many of our State

402 THE WEST IN THE EAST

legislatures, are spending our time and ingenuity
in disentangling ourselves from hastily framed
laws. The logical outcome of our law-making
pace will be a code of laws for, and applicable
to, each individual inhabitant, and then Quis
custodiet custodes?

The inveterate distinction between the East
and the West is as deeply cut in the racial life
of to-day as ever it was. Even in Japan, it is
apparent beneath the thin lacquer of Occident-
alism; while in China, the educated Chinese
will tell you that his government is far more
stable than that of any European or American
state; that orderliness is not more frequently dis-
turbed than in the revolutionary, lynching, war-
ring and strike-producing West; that he has an
ethical code equal to that of the West, and a re-
ligion the mandates of which are observed as
loyally as our own. We write and speak of the
East from a maze of unabashed ignorance; and
they on their part do not trouble to correct or to
contradict us.

That the Chinese are formulating plans to pro-
tect themselves from further commercial aggres-
sion, and from the persistent grabbing of their ter-
ritory by their Christian well-wishers, is true; but
it is done that they may remain more securely
Chinese, not that they may adopt our Western

JOHN CHINAMAN 403

institutions and constitutions, as the glib and
superficial among us are pleased to proclaim.

Those who have no past of tradition, culture
or experience, may be pardoned for assuming
that there is nothing but the present, but only
pardoned because they are ignorant, not because
they are right. They think their own tombs
and temples unsurpassed because they know
nothing of the pyramids and tombs of Egypt;
they think the statues and architecture of our
Western cities unequalled because they have
never heard of Pheidias and Praxiteles, and the
Taj and the Alhambra; they rejoice in modern
dramatists who know not the names of ^schy-
lus and Aristophanes ; they presume to grade all
literature, to whom Pindar and Lucretius are
dim shades; they volunteer short histories, to
whom Herodotus and Thucydides are unknown;
and they rate China low who have never met a
Chinese gentleman, never dealt with a Chinese
merchant, never read a line of Chinese literature
or history, and who do not know the name of
Confucius. This is a ragged and unkempt way
of dealing with other peoples, who may have
some reason to scorn what we cherish. When
one recalls such names and monuments, it be-
comes clear that there is room for the argument
that in certain directions our evolution may look

404 THE WEST IN THE EAST

like deterioration to those who examine us im-
partially from a distance. Galton writes that the
average Athenian was as much superior to the
average European of to-day as we are superior
to the African negro.

We are closely connected with the East, and
we are asking commercial favors of the East;
we are demanding that we may share in loans to
them nowadays, and it is therefore an awkward
time to write and to talk of them with that flip-
pant condescension born of ignorance and inex-
perience. The attitude of our great democra-
cies that everything which is different is therefore
inferior, and fair game for ridicule, is the atti-
tude of the small boy in a village street, who
laughs and jeers at a new figure or a strange
costume. It is sheer intellectual hooliganism.
It is the business of those better informed, and
therefore more sympathetic, to persuade our
great unwieldy mass of ignorant voters that the
wave of mastery and influence from West to
East is now on the wane. The East is rapidly
becoming strong enough to be independent, and
to make terms, instead of having terms dictated,
as from a superior to an inferior.

Mr. Taft, who by his training and experience
at least, and, as I personally believe, by his up-
rightness of character, is as well fitted for the

JOHN CHINAMAN 405

office he holds as any executive we have ever
had, shows how valuable his imperial experi-
ence has been when he points to Peking as the
most difficult post in our diplomatic service; be-
cause it is the foreign post of greatest opportu-
nity, and requiring the most suave, dignified
and competent methods. We want no "new
diplomacy" there, with its bustle and hustle
and its furtive bribery.

The Lord deliver us from the hack politician
in the East, in these difficult days. The man of
that type, who may and does fool the people at
home, will not deceive the Chinese for an instant.
As in India, the British Government must pick
and choose with care its military and civilian
officials, because whatever else they lack the
Indians are unerring in detecting the difference
between the Sahib and the non-Sahib, and giv-
ing him their confidence accordingly; so in China
there are not only Chinese gentlemen ranking
in probity and courtesy with any in the world,
but there are four million pairs of eyes with an
almost uncanny ability to discriminate between
the shoddy and the genuine in gentlemanliness ;
and we shall measure our influence accurately
and inevitably by the type of men we send there
as our representatives. Our commerce with
China, which has decreased since 1905 from some

406 THE WEST IN THE EAST

fifty-eight million to about fifteen million dollars,
and our narrowly avoided humiliation in a late
loan transaction, ought to stir us to a realization
of our slovenly assumption that in dealing with
the Chinese we are dealing with barbarians and
inferiors.

Those jammed, seven-foot-wide streets in
Canton, with the coolies swinging by with long
poles weighted with merchandise at each end
of them; those tiny shops filled with furs, em-
broideries, linen, ivory, carved furniture, and
their keepers fingering the abacus, or counting
over their goods; one shop filled with valuable
ivories and jade and feathers, cunning carvings
and gold ornaments, and beside it another, whose
occupant carries on some primitive handicraft
with the awkward implements of a thousand
years ago ; the dozen shop assistants who tumble
down a narrow stairway into the tiny sales-room
when we enter to look at Mandarin coats, and
who all enter into the bargaining with a zeal that
shows that this is no dull routine, but a combi-
nation of a game and an entertainment, with a
money prize in proportion to the success of the
suave duplicity displayed; in another shop the
astonishing swiftness and deftness and orderli-
ness with which they pull out, and put back,
and fold up the hundreds of pieces of grass-

JOHN CHINAMAN 407

cloth and linen and embroideries shown us; the
temples populated with unknown gods; mort-
uary chapels where polished teak-wood or ma-
hogany coffins, with a stand beside them on
which are placed a light and tea and rice, and
whose occupants wait till the soothsayer has de-
termined upon the fortunate place for burial,
a suspense which lingers according to the wealth
of the family of the deceased; the edible dog
market; the sleepy admiral in his magnificent
silk-lined and gilt-ornamented chair, borne by
six coolies, and escorted by Chinese marines
with old-fashioned muskets over their shoulders ;
the unending, penetrating noise which your
ears seem to breathe like an atmosphere; the
undisturbed and mask-like yellow faces and nar-
row unlighted eyes; the utter indifference to the
lack of privacy, a characteristic of all Orientals,
and one which I often think explains their back-
wardness, for it is impossible to store up ex-
perience, which is the only motive power of real
progress, except by quiet thought; the persist-
ent touters who follow us with beseechings to
visit their shops; the sweating coolies who bear
our chairs, and who feign awful exhaustion after
a particularly long trip, and who laugh and
poke fun at one another when I insist upon
feeling their heart- and pulse-beats, and thus dis-

408 THE WEST IN THE EAST

cover to what extent they are play-acting. All
this is China, but do not be deceived; that wise
old Li Hung Chang was China too; and hun-
dreds more like him who have studied in Eng-
land, Germany, America and Japan are China
too; and unlike too many of us, they have
learned the quintessence of wisdom, that the
cleverest conceal their cleverness.

I do not hesitate to say that if there is to be
amity and fair dealing between us, that the first
step must be taken by us, and that in the di-
rection of correcting false impressions, and of
convincing our own people of their abysmal
ignorance of the real China. The complacent
assumption that China has only to copy us to be
saved, which is practically universal in America,
is a gutter-stage of intellectual enlightenment,
and as dangerous as it is ludicrous. In very
many respects ours is no more a civilization to be
copied than is theirs; and we should never for
a moment forget that the Chinese, high and low,
educated and uneducated, those who have seen
us and those who have not, look upon us as bar-
barians; and hold that many of our social and
political doings are foul blots upon the ethno-
logical map, upon which the races of the world
have traced their progress.

X

JAPAN

THE first edition of the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica" had this much, and no more,
to say of Japan: "Japan or Islands
of Japan, are situated between 130 deg. and 144
deg. of E. long., and between 30 deg. and 40 deg.
N. lat." Some twenty-five words sufficed to tell
the world all that anybody cared to know about
Japan. During the last quarter of a century,
Japan has more written words of description to
her credit than any other country in the world.
It is characteristic of the childlike innocence, or
of the duplicity, of the Japanese, that even their
historical ancestry is a gross forgery. During
the last Paris exhibition, and at the last Japan-
British exhibition, one saw and heard a great
deal of Japan's two thousand five hundred years
of history, and of the authentic ancestry of the
Mikado, reaching back not for hundreds but
for thousands of years. This is taught in the
schools of Japan to-day, and told to, and written
for, foreigners by the Japanese themselves.

409

410 THE WEST IN THE EAST

A Mr. Hitomi, a Japanese, writes for the
French pubhc: "La Longue duree de I'Empire
du Soleil Levant est une des choses les plus mer-
veilleuses de ce monde. Quand il vit la lumiere
tous les pays Europeens d'aujourd'hui dormaient
encore dans les entrailles du chaos. C'est 333
ans avant la conquete des Indes par Alexandre
le Grand et 612 ans avant la victoire de Cesar
sur Pompee que Jimmu, premier empereur du
Japon, pla9a le berceau de I'Empire parmi les
fleurs odoriferantes des plaines du Yamato."
As a bouquet of artificial rhetorical flowers this
has seldom been equalled. As a matter of fact
the first date in Japanese history which is trust-
worthy is A. D. 461. Fable and fact do not be-
gin to separate until that date.

As late as 1892 one professor of history at the
University of Tokio was dismissed for writing
critically of the early mikados ; as a resiilt we find
in a successor's, Mr. Haja's, "Lectures on Ja-
pan" the following: "Some of the odes preserved
in the Kojild and Nihongi were composed by the
gods, some by Jimmu Tennu and other ancient
Mikados, and one by a monkey ! " Mr. Chamber-
lain, in "Things Japanese," writes: "The so-
called historical part is as devoid as the other of
all contemporary evidence. It is contradicted by
the more trustworthy, because contemporary.

JAPAN 411

Chinese and Korean records, and — to turn from
negative to positive testimony — can be proved
in some particulars to rest on actual forgery.
For instance, the fictitious nature of the calen-
dars employed to calculate the early dates for
about thirteen centuries (from B. C. 660 onward)
has not altogether escaped the notice even of the
Japanese themselves, and has been clearly ex-
posed for European readers by that careful in-
vestigator, the late Mr. William Bramsen, who
says, when discussing them in the Introduction
to his 'Japanese Chronological Tables': 'It is
hardly too severe to style this one of the greatest
literary frauds ever perpetrated.' "

The story of the ancient civilization of Japan
is as much a fable as the story of the Golden
Fleece, or Ariadne. That this mythology is
taught in Japanese schools, and written down
for the European as history, is due to the ex-
treme sensitiveness and colossal conceit of the
Japanese, and also because the worship of the
Imperial Ancestry is made a national religion
amongst the mass of the people. Once the
small knot of feudal nobles, who still govern
Japan, lose the influence of the worshipped
Mikado, whom they always call upon in the last
resort to drive home their legislative enactments
among the people, the political troubles of Japan

412 THE WEST IN THE EAST

will begin in earnest. They know him to be a
puppet king, but they realize that so long as the
present feeling of the people toward him lasts,
his sanction is practically the sanction of omnipo-
tence. No wonder it is criminal to criticise, or
even to discuss, the subject of his ancestry.
Once the superstitious awe in which the Japan-
ese Emperor is held by the people disappears,
Japan will be like a study-table covered with
papers, in a breeze, when the paper-weights
have been taken away.

The most interesting date in the history of
Japan to the American is 1853, when Commo-
dore Perry appeared and demanded, and in 1854
succeeded in obtaining, certain treaty rights
granted also shortly after to England, France,
and Russia. Japan at that time was governed
by a feudal noble of the house of Tokugawa.
The founder of this dynasty was a soldier, Hide-
yoshi by name, who conquered Korea, and
dreamed even of conquering China in the last
years of the sixteenth century. His favorite
lieutenant Tokugawa lewasu turned against
Hideyoshi's son, defeated him in battle, consoli-
dated his own power, and for two hundred and
fifty years, or till Commodore Perry appeared,
this family ruled Japan, the Emperor living in
retirement but treated with respect by the

JAPAN 413

powerful Shoguns, the Daimyos or barons, and
their men-at-arms the Samurai.

The nation which can survive two hundred
and fifty years of peace is either neghgent or neg-
ligible. Japan was both negligent and negli-
gible. The great nobles and their followers
had softened and shrunk both in power and
ability. The jealousies, dissatisfactions and ri-
valries came to life when the barbarians' ships
appeared in the harbor of Yeddo. The Shogun
was shuffling and hesitating, torn between fear
of the barbarian intruder, and of his enemies
athome if he treated with him. Rivals of the
house of Tokugawa combined against them.
Instead of the clan patriotism they saw that they
must have national patriotism. Clan jealousies
and enmities must be subordinated to national
defence against the invader. It was seen that
to keep out the European was impossible, and
those in power persuaded their countrymen that
it was better to learn of the foreigner than to fight
him. By 1871 the clans and the feudal lords had
given up their rights and privileges. Europeans
were invited to Japan to teach, and the Japanese
were studying European methods in England, in
America, in Germany, and in France. Many of
these Japanese, including the greatest among
them, the late Prince Ito, were poor and with-

414 THE WEST IN THE EAST

out friends, and earned their living, while they
studied and investigated, among strangers. The
story of these patriotic Japanese, who emigrated
voluntarily to hardship and unfriendliness for
their country's sake, is one that any country
might be proud to tell.

What the Japanese have built, upon the foun-
dations so patiently and painfully laid by these
men, is reckoned the outstanding and pre-emi-
nent national accomplishment of the last fifty
years. Nobody can deprive them of their com-
mercial, political and military successes, and so
far as I know, nobody wishes to do so. If Japan
has suffered at the hands of the Europeans, she
has suffered from eulogy rather than from de-
traction. Unstinted and uncritical praise has
been her portion. She has been the young heir
just come of age among the nations. We have
all gone to the coming-of-age festivities, with
best wishes and friendly words, ready to see only
good in the youngster who has just come into his
own, and with the liveliest and sincerest charity
for youth, and the natural shortcomings of its
exuberance and lack of experience. But the
vagaries, impetuosities, and inconsequences of
youth receive a different greeting, and other
names and epithets, when they are continued on
into early manhood. We rejoice at the baby's

JAPAN 415

first word, his first tooth, his first step; we won-
der at the amazing amount of knowledge and
experience he acquires in his first five years. If
he could continue at that rate through life, he
would easUy out-Solomon Solomon in wisdom.
We soon discover that the rate of progress di-
minishes as the years increase, and we cease to
find his acquisition of knowledge and experi-
ence unusual.

Who does not know men whose youth had its
frailties, its oddities, its selfish inconsequences,
which then were only gay and graceful; but in
maturity, the frailties have fixed themselves in
a rosy formlessness of nose ; the oddities of man-
ner have become unpleasant eccentricities; the
inconsequence has become untrustworthiness.
The very qualities that were not unpleasing in
the youth, have become contemptible in the
man. Youth has, and ought to have in the
bank of all our hearts, a balance of a thousand
pardons to draw upon; but of maturity we de-
mand that the credit balance shall be the results
of saving and economy and accomplishment.

Japan has had her first tooth, and taken her
first step, amid the wondering admiration of
other peoples. She has built ships, organized
commerce, founded a government, fought out a
war. She is no longer an infant nor a callow

416 THE WEST IN THE EAST

youth. New standards of judgment are being
used in the measuring of her political, commer-
cial, ethical and social stature; and both Japan
and her later critics are frankly disappointed.

The days for the Sir Edwin Arnold and Laf-
cadio Hearn literary petting and dandling of the
baby Japan have gone by. It was all mawkish
enough at any time, and did Japan harm that
lasts to this day; and my Japanese friends would,
I am sure, consider it a grotesque study in insult
were I to write to them, or about them, in the
cooing and soft-syllabled noises of a nurse dan-
dling a baby. I have no intention of doing so.
I am merely an advanced picket for my country-
men, returning to describe what I saw, and mak-
ing no claim to infallibility or to a cut-and-dried
solution of the problems awaiting us in the East.
I bring merely maps, sketches, descriptions,
opinions, surmises, and all without malice or
prejudice, except that I am an American, and if
that be treason, I must submit to punishment
from those I describe, in good part.

For nearly a score of years I have been a
visitor, from time to time, to a town in New Eng-
land which is more closely linked to the history of
Japan than any other town in the world. Why
the Japanese Government has not put up a tab-
let or a monument in the town of Fairhaven,

JAPAN 417

Massachusetts, I do not understand. It must
be due to ignorance of the short story I am about
to tell.

Captain Whitfield, of Fairhaven, master of the
ship John Howland, sighted, on a bare rock,
in the Sea of Japan, a group of stranded, ship-
wrecked Japanese sailors. This was in the year
1841. He took them off and carried them to his
first port, Honolulu. One of them, a lad of
about fifteen, begged to be taken on with the
ship. By the time the John Howland reached
her home port of Fairhaven, the boy had picked
up some smattering of the English language, and
was liked by the whole ship's company. Cap-
tain Whitfield paid for his schooling at a good
private school in the town, and there is still
living there, one at least, of his school-mates,
who has described him to me. The boy's name
was Nakahama Manjiro. At the end of six
years Nakahama was one of the accomplished
scholars in the school, and particularly interested
in mathematics and navigation. Through Cap-
tain Whitfield's good oflBces, he was enabled to
pick up his former companions at Honolulu, and
to return to Japan, where he arrived about the
year 1849. He had almost forgotten his own
tongue. He and his companions were suspected,
and kept in close confinement, and their story

418 THE WEST IN THE EAST

doubted. As a test of the truth of his tale he
was given the task of translating Bowditch's
"Navigator," the theory of which he had tried
to explain to his countrymen, into Japanese.
This he succeeded in doing after a year or more
of work.

When Commodore Perry received a letter in
English, in reply to his note to the ruler of Japan
in 1853, he little knew that the writer of it had
learned his English in a New England town not
far from the home port of the Commodore himself.
When he had his interview in person, he little
suspected that concealed within hearing was a
Japanese, whose assurances of the good-will and
honorable intentions of the Americans, from a
personal experience of their kindness and hospi-
tality, was to carry greater weight with the rulers
of Japan than the noise and size of his guns.
If any one individual is to be credited with
making the first intercourse between Japan and
America easy and friendly, it is surely Naka-
hama Manjiro, who was educated in Fairhaven,
Massachusetts. He afterward became a per-
sonage in Japan, was ennobled, navigated the
first ship out of sight of land from that country,
was sent by the Mikado to study the conditions
during the war between France and Germany in
1870, paid a short visit to America on his way

JAPAN 419

home, and leaves two sons, one a distinguished
professor, and the other an officer in the Japan-
ese navy.

I believe Japan only needs to be reminded of
this to ask the honor of commemorating in some
suitable and permanent manner the hero of this
story, in the town which gave him a home and
an education.

It is a far cry indeed from the Japan of the first
edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," or the
Japan of 1853, to the Japan from which I have
just returned. It is now a Japan with a popu-
lation estimated at 50,000,000; with compul-
sory education and compulsory military service;
with an army of a peace strength of 250,000, and
able to put and maintain 800,000 in the field;
with 191 war vessels aggregating 493,371 tons,
and an expenditure on the navy during the last
four years placed at $133,807,000; with nearly
5,000 miles of railways and 18,000 miles of tele-
graph lines; with exports to Great Britain of
25,522,000 yen,' and imports from Great Britain
of 107,796,000 yen; with exports to the United
States of 121,997,000 yen, and imports from the
United States of 77,637,000 yen; and with ex-
ports to and imports from Germany of 7,976,-
000 and 46,179,000 yen respectively. The popu-

' The yen is worth 50 cents in gold.

420 THE WEST IN THE EAST

lation is, six-tenths of it, engaged in agriculture,
and one-tenth dependent upon the fisheries, or
35,000,000 thus employed. So mountainous,
barren, and difficult is the land, that even these
people of ant-like industry and economy can
only bring one-sixth of the total area of 147,651
square miles under cultivation, and more than
one-half of this area is given over to the culti-
vation of rice alone. The foreigners in Japan
number 19,094; the Japanese abroad number
195,272, of whom 95,000 are residents of the
United States, or in our colonies.

After a struggle between the clans of the south :
the Satsuma, the Choshin, the Tosa and the
Hizen; and the Tokugawa regime, which had
been in power for two hundred and fifty years be-
fore the coming of Commodore Perry, the clans
and their leaders, with splendid patriotic magna-
nimity, gave up, ostensibly, not only their pow-
ers but their wealth; but be it understood they
retained and still retain an overwhelming influ-
ence in affairs of state; members of these clans
fill practically all the offices of importance in
the state, the army, and the navy. It is still a
government by an oligarchy, in which nepotism
plays a large part. The Emperor was once more
put in a position of real power, and the House
of Peers and the House of Representatives, con-

JAPAN 421

stituting the Imperial Diet of Japan, created by
the constitution of February, 1889, met for the
first time in November, 1890.

The House of Peers is composed of three
classes: hereditary, comprising the imperial
princes and the higher nobility, sitting in their
own right; nominated, comprising persons
named by the Emperor for services to the state,
and for their learning; elected, including the
majority of the peerage, holding their seats for
seven years, and consisting of a number of vis-
counts and barons elected by their own orders,
representatives of the various provinces returned
subject to the approval of the Emperor, and by
small electoral bodies composed of the highest
taxpayers. The House of Peers numbers about
280 members.

The House of Representatives numbers 379,
a fixed number being returned from each elec-
toral district, the proportion being 1 to about
127,000. This lower house sits for four years,
and is bound to meet once every year for at
least three months. These members are re-
turned upon a taxpaying, residential, and age
franchise. The electors must be male Japanese
subjects of not less than full twenty-five years of
age. The members of both the House of Peers
and the House of Representatives receive $1,000

422 THE WEST IN THE EAST

a year, besides travelling expenses. This Im-
perial Diet has control over the finances. Min-
isters, or officials of their departments designated
by these ministers, sit in the chamber, but only
at their own option, to defend their departments
or to answer questions. The Japanese bor-
rowed their military methods from Germany,
and their parliamentary model was evidently
German as well.

On examining the constitution of these two
houses it is seen, even by the reader of so slight
a sketch as this, how preponderating may be the
control of the Emperor. The ministers or cabi-
net are nominated by, and are the servants of,
the Emperor. They are not responsible to the
Diet, and may remain in office as long as the Em-
peror so pleases. The government thus legislates
through two chambers without being responsible
to either. The lower house is almost of neces-
sity an opposition. So it has proved itself.
More than once the government has found itself
balked and brought to a stand-stUl. Then the
still awesome power of the Emperor is called in.
He sends an imperial message to the recalcitrant
or truculent members that such unseemly par-
liamentary conflicts are "likely to disturb the
spirits of my ancestors," then after a confer-
ence between the government and the opposition,

JAPAN 423

the Budget for the year, let us say, is passed.
But Hamlet cannot forever be appealing to the
ghost. There will come a time when the deep
voice from nowhere will be laughed at and
flouted; and when the mystic power invoked
will be analyzed and found to be, as it is,
vaporous.

There is no state, no oflScial religion. The
lower classes are still devoted to their old shrines,
their old wooden idols, the mandates of their
ignorant Buddhist and Shinto priests ; and they
still contribute, what for a poor people are enor-
mous sums, for the maintenance and building
of shrines and temples.

One of the features of Japanese civilization
to-day is the bands of pUgrims one sees aU
over the country, from little family parties to
parties of thousands, on their way to this shrine
or that, or to Fuji, or some other sacred moun-
tain. At some of these places prostitutes are
provided for the pilgrims. This outrages our
sense of decency and appeals to us as coarse and
crude blasphemy; but not one Japanese in a
thousand can even understand such an attitude
of mind or such a phase of morality. With us
this matter of the relation of the sexes is recog-
nized universally not only as immoral but crimi-
nal. It is only fair to the Japanese to explain

424 THE WEST IN THE EAST

that their attitude is so distinctly different from
our own in this matter, that they are no more to
be judged harshly on this subject than are chil-
dren who take candy that does not belong to
them, or who go too near the fire before they
know that fire burns. There is even no word,
in Japanese, for male chastity. Every child of
the present Mikado is the offspring of a concu-
bine. The Empress has borne no children.

The upper and educated classes are sceptical,
or frankly agnostic. At one time the Catholics,
and at another the Unitarians, sincerely believed
that Japan was about to become Catholic or
Unitarian. The Japanese are great nibblers
intellectually. Their gentleness of manner, and
apparent receptivity, lead the foreign missionary
to believe that he is making headway; and like
other men he loses no opportunity to proclaim
his success to his co-religionists at home, only to
find that mere curiosity was at the bottom of
the Japanese reception of him and his message;
and that at the end of a few years the Japanese
are nibbling as politely, and as smilingly as ever,
at some other sectarian cheese. Nor are the
missionaries to blame, for among missionaries it
would be hard to match the honor-roll of names
beginning with Francis Xavier, and coming down
to Verbeck, Brown, Hepburn, and Gale in Korea.

JAPAN 425

It is not only in religious and ethical fields, that
the Japanese wander and browse with no great
seriousness of purpose. It looked at one time
as though the Japanese intended to adopt Euro-
pean costumes, but in 1888 the cry of Japan for
the Japanese was heard, and there was a revo-
lution of feeling, and a general change back to
Japanese dress. Their fads are innumerable.
They have gone in for rabbits, for cock-fighting,
for wrestling, for waltzing, for picnics on a grand
scale, for elaborate funerals, and they discussed
seriously the question as to whether April Fool's
Day should be celebrated, all at different times;
and one after the other these have been neg-
lected and forgotten, and they have discarded
one faith or one fad after another, with the
same nonchalance with which they have changed
back and forth, to and from the European cos-
tume. It must not be deduced from this that
I am criticising the Japanese as an unstable
people of whims and fancies. These excursions,
religious, social and sartorial, may be merely
trial trips in the search for the best. In what I
write, I try to explain to my countrymen; there
is no malicious nor mischievous intention to fo-
ment ill-feeling, nor to excite ridicule; that role
may best be left to those who count a fleeting and
sectional popularity as sufficient payment for the
sale of one's own soul.

426 THE WEST IN THE EAST

The one all-pervading influence has ever been,
and is to-day, nor has it lost its hold altogether
even upon the sceptics, ancestor- worship : wor-
ship and service for the ancestors of the family,
of the clan, and of the Emperor. When the
woman is married, her name is stricken off the
records of her father's family, and added to that
of her husband, and she becomes a worshipper
of his ancestors; the loyalty to clan and to clan
ancestors still persists; and, as I have written,
the loyalty to the Emperor and the imperial an-
cestry is like our patriotism of the best kind,
and keeps all the divergent interests submissive,
and remains still as the last court of appeal.

The regime of the Shoguns, a word equivalent
in meaning to the Roman Imperator, which in-
troduces us to the Japan we know, and which
lasted from 1600 to 1868, meant 270 Daimyos,
with their Samurai or noble vassals, and 1,500,-
000 dependent upon them, and this pinnacle
supported by a base of what were practically
30,000,000 serfs. Even thirty years ago not one
person in ten could afford even rice, but lived on
barley, or barley and a little rice; now six out of
ten have a square meal of rice every day.

It was this arrangement of society which ex-
plains both the present strength and weakness of
Japan. Not to remember that these people are
only just emerging from feudalism, from clan

JAPAN 427

government, and that the origins of such ethical
systems and sanctions as they have, have their
roots in Confucianism, which is agnostic and
monarchial, and in the subservient loyalty of
man to master, and of the Sir Galahad loyalty as
between brothers in arms, described in their code
of Bushido, is to leave Japan a sealed book.

The fierce patriotism animating those who with
shouts of delight charged again and again over
lines of their own slain against Russian breast-
works; what does it mean ? The patient, smiling
stoicism ; what does it mean ? The domestic and
moral slavery of the women; what does it mean ?
The commercial chicanery and unconscious con-
sciencelessness, from the twenty-four members
of the House of Representatives now in prison
in connection with the sugar frauds, and the
First Army Division scandal in regard to tenders
for new depots, down to the three thousand
weights and measures captured by the police of
Tokio, in a simultaneous raid upon the dealers
in rice; what does it mean ? The self-sacrificing
patriotism, and simple honorable living of Prince
Ito, and other men like him; what does it mean ?
The jump, from knights in chain armor, with
two-handled swords, to the latest fashion in
dreadnoughts, and this in one generation; what
does it mean ? A constitution, an army, a navy.

428 THE WEST IN THE EAST

a complete school system and miles of progress
along the road of industrial and commercial
competition, the defeat of one great European
power, and an alliance with the greatest power
of all, the British Empire ; what does it all mean ?

The gains are so gigantic, the changes have
been so swift, the child has become so surrepti-
tiously a strong man, that enthusiasts shout: a
miracle! Poets praise without stint and with
facts wreathed in the flowers of rhetoric; and
travellers interpret the bows and smiles of shop-
keepers and Geisha girls into a national certifi-
cate for courtesy; and readers in foreign lands
either shiver in fear of the "Japanese Peril," or
are hypnotized into believing that here at last
is the new heaven and the new earth of the Book
of Revelations. A world-wide false impression of
Japan has been given by the eclogues of Euro-
pean visitors, whose opinions would be more
valuable had they seen less of her women and
known more of her men. Cant is not peculiar
to the Puritan; the Cavaliers, the literary Cav-
aliers, have a cant of their own.

However easily satisfied the rest of the world
may be, with fantastic and superficial explana-
tions and descriptions of the origins, and the
present status, and the probable results of this
Japanese civilization, we Americans are vitally

JAPAN 429

concerned to know as much as we can of nothing
but the truth. What has most impressed the
world is the suddenly developed military prowess
of the Japanese. The victory over the Chinese
is a negligible laurel. The Chinese are a people
who have idealized for centuries the student and
the merchant, and despised the warrior. Chi-
nese of seventy are still proud to be going up
for examinations that for fifty years they have
failed to pass. Even an unsuccessful student is
of more importance than a successful soldier.
This situation is only now beginning to change
slowly.

The victory over the Russians was an incon-
clusive victory. Nearly 900,000 Russians were
securely intrenched, and more were coming into
northern Manchuria, when peace terms were
concluded at Portsmouth. Between March 31,
1904, and March 31, 1907, the national debt of
Japan increased from $280,000,000 to the enor-
mous amount of $1,135,000,000; and Russia
declined even to negotiate unless any con-
sideration of an indemnity was waived; and
Russia paid nothing, ceded no territory of her
own, what she relinquished belonged to China,
and lost nothing but prestige, for which she
seemed to care nothing. This war cost the
Japanese $1,000,000,000; 85,000 killed, and

430 THE WEST IN THE EAST

over 600,000 casualities. A drawn battle with
the Japanese did not seem to Russia then, and
from what one hears in iRussia to-day, does not
seem to them now, as a matter of much conse-
quence. Had it not been for the condition of
her domestic political affairs, she would not have
consented even to appear at Portsmouth, for she
knew, as the chancellories of all Europe knew,
that Japan was at her last gasp financially.

The alliance with Great Britain may have
been a good stroke of diplomacy for Great
Britain at the time; but it was a short-sighted
policy, and the British are by no means so in
love with the alliance now, as then, when they
considered it a supreme blow at any Russian
threatening of their frontiers in India. And it
is well known now that a Japanese alliance was
hawked about the continent before it was ac-
cepted by Great Britain.

It is easy to see that the organization of an
army, that military prowess, are the line of least
resistance for a people with the past history of
the Japanese. It was comparatively easy to
convert the fighting feudalism of earlier days
into the terms of a modern navy and army.
What Wellington said of the playing-fields of the
great English public-schools, and the result at
Waterloo, may be said as justifiably of Bushido,

JAPAN 431

and the battle of the Yalu River. I have no
wish to detract from the merit of Japanese mili-
tary success, I merely call attention to the fact
that it has its roots, and well-defined ones, in the
past, and is not a military Cinderella, as the
fairy-story writers on modem Japan would lead
one to believe. Everybody agrees to praise the
obedience, the discipline and the courage of the
Japanese soldier.

But now comes the diflScult task, and along
the lines of the hardest resistance, which is to
convert this clan system, which despised com-
merce and industry, which taught its youth that
"trade is the only game where the winner is
disgraced," into commercial and industrial effi-
ciency. Just as everybody agrees to praise the
Japanese as a soldier, so everybody agrees to
question the honesty of the Japanese as a trader.
My own reception in Japan, the constant hos-
pitality shown me there, the intelligent and cour-
teous gentlemen who helped me and entertained
me there, make it hard to understand the causes
of the bitter hostility to the Japanese, not on our
Western coast only, but all through the East, in
which I had been travelling for many months.

It is only when you leave the high official, the
kindly and considerate host, the travelled and
cosmopolitan Japanese, and hear tales of the

432 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Japanese as they are; see them as they are, at
the temples or in the public gardens; in the
crowded narrow streets of Kioto, for example;
at the railway stations ; in the railway carriages,
hawking, spitting, smoking, scattering ashes,
until the carriage floor looks like an elongated
cuspidor; at the entrances and exits of the
theatres ; at the booths and side-shows of a fair,
or around a popular temple ; crowded in a tram-
car; or when you deal with subordinates at a
bank, post-office, railway station, or telegraph
office; then you realize how and why, practically
the people of all nations who have constant
dealings with them, from ambassadors to travel-
ling salesmen, have grown to hate them with an
untempered zeal. Their fussy and self-conscious
politeness; their comical vanity and self-satis-
faction; their parochial assumption that all the
world is wrong, they alone right; their lack
of consideration for others, particularly for their
women; their callow and sophisticated youthful-
ness; the lack of personal dignity, and in its
place a chip-on-the-shoulder assertiveness ; their
new feeling of a scarcely veiled contempt for the
white race, which, by the way, is not even veiled
among the Chinese; all these characteristics,
overlaid with a lacquer of hardness and a
national selfishness which no European ever

JAPAN 433

penetrates — even poor Lafcadio Hearn learned
it to his cost before he died — account to some
extent for this extraordinary shift of opinion
upon the part of Europeans, from condescend-
ing fondness, to virulent and loudly expressed
contempt.

But why, the intelligent reader will ask, have
travellers and writers for years praised the gen-
tleness, the courtesy, the almost primeval hon-
esty, the patience of these people ; their painstak-
ing workmanship of swords, lacquers, carvings,
porcelains, iron-work, to turn upon them now
with all manner of insult and suspicion for their
industrial, commercial and moral standards.
It does not seem to me a difficult question to
answer.

The craftsmen of Japan, in the old days,
worked for their lords or their rich and noble
patrons. They were protected, supported and
praised, not paid, for their work; it was a labor
of love. Buyers and sellers, and hawkers and
traders, were a despised class. The Japanese,
too, have had practically no personal liberty as
we know it. Their work, profession, status and
habitat were fixed; and even small crimes were
punished with death. Their amusements were
simple, their holidays spent as Watteau's shep-
herds and shepherdesses spent theirs, and they

434 THE WEST IN THE EAST

were to a man under the thumb of clan rulers,
and without opportunity for moral vagaries, or
personal choice, in the matter of habits and
customs. Everybody worked for some house-
hold, and every household worked for some
clan. A man was obliged by law, in feudal
times, to earn his living, to marry, to bring up
his family and to die, in the place where he was
born ; and even to-day it is expected, and is gen-
erally the custom, though such restrictions are
rapidly passing. The loosening of family bonds,
the greater liberty of the individual, mean little
to us, perhaps, as we read of it; but in Japan it
means the lessening of the restraining power of
religion itself. A nation of ancestor- worshippers
depend upon the integrity of the family life for
all their moral as well as religious sanctions;
and the growth of individualism in Japan was
sure to be followed by a certain moral laxity.
We are seeing that to-day. To do away with
the family cult of each family's ancestors is to do
away with religion, is to do away with the great
spiritual restraining and warning hand, which
had kept moral irregularities in abeyance. It
was the civilization of a jelly-mould. Of a
sudden the mould is broken. Each must take
care of himself, each must make a living for
himself, each must fend and fight for himself.

JAPAN 435

each must learn to make and to spend money.
It is a poor country, the natural wealth of the
country is small, and it is overcrowded; com-
petition is severe, and the old rule of unques-
tioning loyalty is everywhere lessening; and the
new laws of economic competition, both at home
and abroad, come into existence, and there fol-
lows chaos.

On top of this come war, prestige, praise, alli-
ance with the mightiest, and overwhelming na-
tional debts; and there follow self-satisfaction,
vanity and self -consciousness. Japan suffers
from being the novus homo among the nations.
She has not our morals, our manners, our dress,
our religion, our familiarity with wealth and lux-
ury, our tastes in art, literature or music, none
of our European traditions in short, or our fa-
miliarity with the written or spoken languages
of ancient and modern culture and civilization.
This nation, which in its own clothes, in its own
home, and in familiar surroundings, and living
by its own moral code, was dubbed graceful,
polite, gentle and unassuming, is now, because
judged by an entirely different standard, awk-
ward, unmoral, self-conscious, bumptious and
dishonest.

One sometimes sees an individual of one na-
tion who wishes to appear to be of another.

436 THE WEST IN THE EAST

There was a time wlien the EngHshman was
proud to be deemed "Italianated," or to be
called the "Mirror of Tuscany"; and there are
Englishmen to-day who vaunt the civilization
of France as higher than their own. There are,
alas, Americans who emigrate, socially and na-
tionally, to London or to Paris, and who ape
the accent, the manner and what they deem by
an entirely mistaken view to be the sedulous
anxiety of the Englishman to avoid intercourse
with whomsoever is great-grandfatherless. Try-
ing to be superficially what essentially one is
not, is an awkward business, and these her-
maphrodite patriots are ridiculous abroad and
a mortification at home. In the case of the
Japanese, the whole nation is trying to appear
to be what it is not; they are trying to do things
that are not natural to them; trying to assume
an equality with others along lines that are
foreign to them; and although these efforts are
prodigious, and here and there successful, the
general result cannot help being slightly ridic-
ulous. There was no exaggeration in the old
praise, there is no exaggeration in the new
blame.

To insist upon building the Antung-Mukden
railway into a broad-gauge road, amply serv-
iceable for troops and freight, if the words of a

JAPAN 437

treaty mean anything, was taking a mean advan-
tage of the Chinese. The concession for the
construction of the Chinchow-Aigun railway,
America making the loan to China, and an
English firm contracting to build the road, was
held up on a protest from Japan. Why China,
an unconquered and independent nation, should
not be allowed to build a railway, controlled
and owned by the state, and far removed from
any Japanese interest, it is hard to understand.
England declines to assist the project in any
way. England is for the moment interna-
tionally supine. She is fully occupied with the
tearing at her domestic vitals of a demagogue-
fed, and demagogue-bred, class war, which a
knot of recalcitrants, who have paid for admis-
sion with money they have begged in a foreign
country, watch, with their thumbs turned down
to every appeal for fair-play. England's attitude
is apparently that China is to have no rights as
over against her ally Japan's wishes. At Hong-
chow, when I was in China, the Japanese were
trading in the interior in spite of specific treaties
forbidding it, and when ordered away by the
Chinese governor, were leaving with impudent
reluctance.

Three treaties define Japan's position in
Manchuria: I. the Anglo- Japanese treaty of

438 THE WEST IN THE EAST

August, 1905; II. the Portsmouth treaty of
September, 1905; III. the China- Japan treaty
of December, 1905. Japan subscribes in all of
these treaties to the policy of the open door in
Manchuria, but is doing her best to make all
things easy for Japanese enterprise and com-
merce, and the reverse for every other nation.

Though the Chinese and Japanese cannot
understand each other's speech, they can read
each other's writing or ideographs. This helps
the Japanese in their honest trade with the Chi-
nese very materially, because labels, addresses,
firm marks, and brands are made easily plain;
but it helps also in the forgery of patent marks,
labels, and brands, and this has become an occa-
sional feature of Japanese commercial methods.

Half an hour's walk in Tokio, writes the Brit-
ish ambassador, will discover ten to twenty imita-
tions of British trade-marks. One may buy all
over China to-day the English Rodgers's razors,
made in Japan. More than one Chinese news-
sheet is edited and controlled by Japanese;
and these are the sheets which are loudest in
their demands for the driving out of China of
the foreigner. At the final meeting of the Nip-
pon Syndicate, Limited, in London, the chair-
man said that the reason for the winding up of
the company's affairs was due, he regretted to

JAPAN 439

say, "to the wide-spread unreliability of the
Japanese nation in commerce, no less than to
the reluctance of our allies to admit British
enterprise to any share of the resources of the
Far East. The selfish policy of the Japanese
had reduced the doctrine of the open door to
nothing more or less than a fiction." The
Japanese consul himself, in Tientsin, reported
to his government that "the Chinese regard
Japanese goods with serious distrust as being
cheaply and badly packed and not up to sample."
While in India I heard of a large amount of
money involved in the suit of an Indian exporter
from Japan, who claimed that he had been
shamefully deceived by the difference between
samples and the cotton goods received. One of
our American school-books was stolen bodily
and reprinted in Japan. The American pub-
lishers, through our State Department, remon-
strated. The Japanese reply was that the book
was not the same, because they had corrected
certain verbal errors in the original!

The new Japanese tariff comes into force on
July 1, 1911. The average of new duties on
British goods is estimated at an advance of
two-thirds upon existing rates. On goods from
other countries the increase in the average of
the duties is about fifty per cent. But, says

440 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Count Komura, the Foreign Secretary of Japan,
in an official statement of Japanese policy:
"Great Britain has what is called a free-trade
policy; there is no room for a convention with
that country." This is frank cynicism enough,
one would think, to penetrate the British com-
mercial understanding. If this is not enough,
the new tariff increases the duties on printed
goods from eight pence to twenty-two pence;
on white shirtings the duty is nearly quadru-
pled, and on cotton Italians the increase is even
greater.

In spite of the alliance, the British community
in Japan does not receive the "most-favored-
nation" treatment, but its members are re-
garded as undesirable aliens, as are the repre-
sentatives of other nations ; and now in addition
the tariff wall against British goods has been
raised to an almost unclimbable height.

The total of Japanese imports and exports in
1868 amounted to $13,123,272; in 1904 to
$303,318,980; and in 1908 to $407,251,500. It
may be that the Japanese now believe that they
can afford to look upon their alliance with
Great Britain as a favor bestowed rather than
as a favor received. They have got out of it the
peace and protection they needed in a time of
great strain; their army and navy they assume.

JAPAN 441

some of their high officials even claim as much,
are more needed by Great Britain than is Great
Britain's protection by Japan, and therefore
they can now deal with Great Britain on even
terms. This may or may not be good diplo-
macy, wise commercial methods. With that I
have nothing to do. I cite it as a national ex-
ample of the same spirit which pervades their
dealings as individuals. Whatever else it may
be, it is not "playing the game."

Even their hospitality is suspicious beneath
its outward graciousness. Very few Americans
know, when the American fleet was welcomed
with loud acclaims of friendliness at Yokohama,
that all the rest of the Japanese ships and men
were mobilized near Nagasaki and kept there,
even depriving men of leave, till the American
fleet sailed away. This is of the type of frank
friendliness which leads Japanese officers to
run between the shafts of a jinrickishaw in order
to listen to the conversation of the foreign
officers they draw. Somehow these strike us as
the degrading precautions of a morally vulgar
and low type of civilization. These things are
not easy for us to understand, or to dismiss with
a smile, except of contempt.

I could fill this chapter, and many chapters,
with example after example of the untrustwor-

442 THE WEST IN THE EAST

thiness of the Japanese merchants and indus-
trials, I have cited instances merely to show
the reader that this accusation is not gossip.
But I have little taste for accusations, and no
enmity against the Japanese, for I cannot pict-
ure a kindlier hospitality than I received. This
is all by way of explanation, as is much that
is to follow, and by no means a tirade; and
also because it is quite fair, and high time, that
we dropped the songs of the nursery and dis-
cussed Japan by the grown-up standards, by
which she now claims the right to be judged.

We have come to believe in the West, that no
progress along moral lines can be attained with-
out putting women on the same level of moral
and mental opportunity with men. Without
respect for womanhood we believe that men can-
not respect themselves, and that the degradation
of women means the degradation of men. The
Japanese neither believe this nor act upon it.
During the seven years, 1890-1897, there were
2,450,838 marriages in Japan, 821,121 divorces,
and 523,992 illegitimate births. Prostitution in
Japan is regulated, controlled and taxed by the
state. The last census gives the number of
females in Japan as 23,131,207; of this number,
7,587,979 are between the ages of fifteen and
thirty-five, or roughly the age when the Eastern

JAPAN 443

woman is physically attractive. One writer
claims that there are "500,000 public prosti-
tutes, and at least 1,000,000 daruma and meshi-
inori,^ etc., etc.; the total of women practising
prostitution is probably 1,400,000, and if to this
again about 500,000 Geisha be added, the com-
plete grand total cannot be short of nearly
2,000,000." It seems impossible that this can
be true, though I have figures from an official
in the Finance Department, who procured them
from the Home Department, which confirm this
estimate. But even if it were cut in half, and
this is an absurd underestimate, it shows that of
all the women in Japan between the ages of fif-
teen and thirty-five, one out of every seven and a
half is thus employed. It is true, at all events,
and every traveller with eyes to see may investi-
gate for himself, that the whole eastern coast
from Zanzibar to Kamtschatka is fringed with
Japanese prostitutes. In Bombay, Calcutta,
Hongkong, Singapore, Shanghai, and so on all
around the coast, this Japanese export is promi-
nent. The Japanese authorities recognize this
and are trying to stop this emigration of young
women, which is a standing disgrace to them,
along 15,000 miles of sea-coast.

> Japanese words used in the provinces and meaning procuresses,
or low-class Conciliatrices.

444 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It is a not uncommon thing for a Japanese
girl to sell herself at home or abroad, to gain
the money with which to marry and settle
down, the future husband agreeing to this man-
ner of gaining the marriage portion. As I
have noted, the Emperor sets the example by
giving his people an heir to the throne born of
a concubine ; and no Japanese, of whatever posi-
tion in society, would hesitate to take one, or
as many as were necessary of these women, into
his household to procure a son to continue the
ancestor- worship. A Japanese nobleman, well
known as a diplomat in Europe and in this
country, in discussing this question with me,
remarked: "What a fine thing if you had in
your country a descendant of George Washing-
ton!" He intimated, too, that in his country
the whole question was treated as a matter of
practical hygiene, just as we provide a pure-
food law, while in England and in America we
balked at dealing with the matter frankly and
wisely, and treated it like hypocrites. He was
right up to a certain point, for there are no streets
paraded by soliciting women in Tokio as are
Piccadilly, London; certain streets in New York;
the Boulevards, and the shambles of Mont-
martre, in Paris. In Japan the laws are strin-
gent upon this subject, and the punishment for

JAPAN 445

illegal use of houses is a heavy fine and impris-
onment. The women are segregated in certain
districts, and are regularly taxed and visited.

The three laws for Japanese women are obedi-
ence to father and mother as a child ; obedience
to husband as a wife; finally obedience to her
children as an old woman. The women are
gentle, fertile, and obedient; and it is disconcert-
ing to the logical mind to find that their most
fervent admirers are to be found among our
American women, who are considered by all the
world to be sophisticated and independent, and
by that unanswerable critic, the Census, to be
rapidly losing the position they ought to hold in
the birth-rate column.

If the American woman knew that every inn,
every tea-house and every hotel, and many of
the temples in Japan offered easy virtue to every
traveller and pilgrim so disposed; and that the
sale of herself by the woman, to relieve family
necessities, is looked upon as a worthy self-
sacrifice in thousands of Japanese households;
if she could see the whole Japanese attitude
toward this question, both at home and abroad,
she would consider the admission of the Japan-
ese in any numbers into this country, to be edu-
cated side by side with our children, in the pub-
lic schools, as an intolerable suggestion. And

446 THE WEST IN THE EAST

she would consider that to permit freedom of so-
cial intercourse between Japanese men and the
young women of America an insulting sugges-
tion. Even when Japanese gentlemen entertain,
professional women are called in for the occa-
sion. It will be time to talk of offering the
freedom of our guarded and cherished homes to
the Japanese, when the Japanese have our ideals
of what such a home ought to be.

Our "Western coast is right, and not till victory
over our forces on sea and land brings them, will
the Japanese be permitted to colonize in any
part of America, untU her civilization is purged
and changed in this respect. Far be it from me
to sit in judgment over the nations of the earth,
to claim that we are right and others wrong;
and I trust that the reader will realize that I
have been stating facts, noting differences, and
not offering ponderous protocols, as though the
possession of a pen produced omniscience. I
should be sorry to be included in that category
of travellers, and writers about other countries,
who look upon every difference, every incon-
venience, every displeasing incident as a griev-
ance. I look upon them not as grievances, but
as experiences, and I try to deal with them as
such, for my own benefit, and that of my
countrymen.

JAPAN 447

It was only recently and after a valiant fight,
led by the members of the European Salvation
Army in Japan, and at the risk of personal vio-
lence to themselves, that the shameful slavery to
which the inmates of the Yoshiwara, or Prosti-
tutes' Quarter, were subjected, was mitigated;
and women who wished to escape were given the
opportunity to do so. Before the Japanese
woman is allowed to stand securely upon the
rhetorical pedestal built for her by Lafcadio
Hearn, and accepted as appropriate to her moral
and social status by indifferent and superficial
travellers, she must be judged by other standards,
and with evidence furnished by less frankly
partial witnesses.

The total net debt of the United States, that
is, what remains after deducting the cash ia the
Treasury, was, on June 30, 1908, $938,132,409.
About $155,000,000 was paying at the rate of
four per cent, the balance two or three per cent.
The estimated value of property in the United
States in 1904 was estimated at $107,104,-
192,410.

The debt of Japan, one of the poorest coun-
tries in the world, with more than one-half of its
cultivated area given over to the raising of rice,
was, on March 31, 1908, $1,138,173,226, and
the internal loans pay from five to eight per

448 THE WEST IN THE EAST

cent, and the foreign loans from four to six per
cent.*

A Japanese writer, Adachi Kinnosuke by
name, writes: "People in Japan with $50,000
a year or more are asked to hand over to the
government $34,000 of it. Wonderful, is it not ?
More wonderful still, they say nothing about it.
Of course it is graded down so that a man with
$500 yearly income pays about seventeen per
cent. On an average the people of Japan pay
about thirty per cent of their net income in taxa-
tion in one form or another — a taxation which
would create a revolution in Europe or America
in twenty-four hours." This Japanese writer,
who is apparently proud of this situation in his
own country, might have gone further and said,
not only that there would be a revolution in
Europe and America, but also that our present
freedom, our religious and political liberty, have

'THE EXPENDITURES OP JAPAN IN YEN

1901 266,856,824

1905 420,741,735

1910 634,303,861

THE TAXES OP JAPAN IN YEN

1901 135,652,181

1905 264,624,842

1910 320,225,718

THE NATIONAL DEBT OP JAPAN IN YEN

1901 496,765,040

1905 2,082,582,822

1910 2,331,090,448

JAPAN 449

been won by revolutions in the past, to enable
us to escape from just such tyrannical taxation.
The oligarchical clan government of Japan is
bleeding people to death to provide an army
and navy, and for the conduct of war. A little
historical knowledge would have shown this
gentleman that we do not envy him, and that
Magna Charta, Charles the First, the French
Revolutions, and the American Revolution are
incidents in the combined history of Europe and
America to prove it.

In his treatment of the case the slight premise
is assumed that we should all be better off if we
were Japanese! Hearn's brief for the Japanese
women omits the same corner-stone in the build-
ing of his monument. The Japanese have
reached a phase of megalomania, where they
fancy that the rest of the world looks upon them
with awe and envy. No one who has not talked
day after day with the Japanese appreciates this.
Many of them, as is the case with Mr. Adachi
Kinnosuke, hold up their hands and say:
"Wonderful, is it not.?" It is barely possible
that we do not think it wonderful at all, that
on the contrary we think it deplorable. It is
barely possible that we prefer American to
Japanese standards; American to Japanese
morality; American to Japanese women ; Amer-

450 THE WEST IN THE EAST

ican to Japanese national debt and taxation;
American to Japanese civilization; and Ameri-
can to Japanese estimation in the eyes of the
world. As an American I should be mortified to
think that my country, my country's institutions,
my countrymen or my countrywomen, could be
confounded for a moment with the Japanese.

We escaped from the slavery of feudalism
many years ago. Japan is as much in the grip
of the feudal baron and feudal methods to-day
as she was in the days of the Shogunate. Their
Emperor is not a constitutional ruler, but a god,
a puppet-king, as a high Japanese oflBcial has
called him; their House of Representatives has
little more final voice in policy and legislation
than have the Boy Scouts upon American policy
and legislation; the Japanese are not taxed,
they are robbed, as were our ancestors when
they were serfs and villeins. If we retrograded
to such taxation as obtains in Japan, it would
be because it could not be helped, as is the case
in Japan to-day. We are not in the stage of
civilization where there is nothing to be bought
with money but rice, sake, Geisha girls, and the
favor of Shinto or Buddhist temple-servers; if
we were, we might not crave wealth, might in-
deed rejoice to be soldiers, as a relief from pov-
erty and monotony.

JAPAN 451

Though life in Japan is not monotonous to
the Japanese, for they are distinctly a bright,
cheerful and happy people, it would be burden-
somely monotonous to us. Their women are
docile housewives, who spend next to nothing
upon themselves, and know nothing of liberty or
luxury. They take no part in the social en-
joyments and hospitalities of their husbands,
who when they can aflFord it, call in the aid of a
restaurant, and Geisha girls, when they entertain.
Neither men nor women have the countless in-
terests of literature, art, theatres, sports, games,
travel, charity, religious societies, clubs, which
make the poorest of us love our independence.

It is not worth gambling, with your soul as
stake, to win the whole world of Japan, because
to the Westerner, be he right or wrong in his
appreciation, the whole world of Japan is not
worth having, at the price of their present sla-
very. We must wait till luxury comes and
wealth; the cry of their women for liberty and
something approaching equality of opportunity;
strikes and the organization of labor; the escape
of the members of the Imperial Diet from the
sway of a puppet-king endowed with ghostly
powers; the awakening of the nation to the
pleasures and opportunities of life as we know
them; we must wait till then.

452 THE WEST IN THE EAST

They have not been tested as yet with the real
temptations of power; with the strain and stress
of representative government; with the poisonous
vapors of prosperity; with the demands and ex-
pectations of the superficially educated ; with the
unpatriotic lawlessness of millions of aliens ; with
masses of people under no religious restraint.
No devil has taken them up into the high moun-
tain of civilization, and shown them the king-
doms of the world and tempted them; and untU
that time comes, the Japanese must be con-
sidered as still in the making, and outside of
any but a hypothetical judgment.

They took their religion, their Confucian code
of ethics, their art, their alphabet even, all that
they have, indeed, from India, China, and Korea.
They adopted them, but they have not improved
them. They have no porcelain, no painting, no
carving, no literature, no ethical code, no religion
which are improvements upon what they imi-
tated. Their past is a copy of the East, their
present is a copy of the West. They have imi-
tated our mills, machines, arms and instruments,
but no Japanese even would claim that they have
invented anything of their own, or improved upon
the Western models. It is evident that a man
who can only imitate must always remain behind.

There is one department of modern life where

JAPAN 453

the mere imitator must necessarily find great
diflBculties, and that is in the department of
government, especially the governing of other
races far away from one's own country. The
mere machinery of government may suflBce at
home, where all men by centuries of conformity
have adjusted themselves, but no machinery is
enough to make the governing of alien races easy.
The machinery then becomes subordinate to
those who use it, adapt it, fit it to daily exigen-
cies, and adjust it nicely to other habits, customs,
and prejudices. Whatever else we may have
added to the fund of the stored-up experience
of civilization, our race may claim an easy pre-
eminence in this domain. Here, at any rate,
we have earned the right to look on with a
critical eye, at the endeavors of other governors,
whether they be French or Japanese.

We may claim, too, that there is no higher test
of a man's all-round ability, and no fairer test of
a nation's claim to greatness, than the individ-
ual's or the nation's prowess in this field of effort.
Whether he be a country parson, the manager of
a great railroad, or the governor of a wide prov-
ince, inhabited by millions of an alien race, he
ranks among the men of unusual powers in his
degree who succeeds in adjusting differences;
harmonizing conflicting aims; gaining confidence

454 THE WEST IN THE EAST

by his cheerful but unbending justice; solving
problems by superior wisdom; gaining the al-
legiance of warring factions, and leading all alike
along the path he has marked out for himself
and them; while the greatest rulers, men like
Clive and Cromwell and Lincoln, rank with the
few shining ones in war, art and literature, as
the prize products of humanity.

Japan has not gained the respect, the con-
fidence, or the quiet control of Formosa, Korea,
or lower Manchuria. In all the months I was
in India I never saw a white man ill-use a brown
one; I did not visit Formosa, but the Japanese
are burning villages and shooting down the na-
tives there as I write. I did travel through the
whole length of Korea, crossed the Yalu River,
and travelled through the whole length of the
Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria, and
never a day passed that I did not see rough and
often violent treatment of Koreans and Manchus
by Japanese soldiers, police, and the lower class
of labor employed there. It is fair to say that
the late Prince Ito, and the present Consul-
General of Korea, and all the many Japanese
officials whom I met, were heartily in accord,
and sincerely in earnest, in their endeavors to
do away with these rough and bullying methods,
but they have not succeeded in preventing them.

JAPAN 455

The Japanese of all classes, high and low, are
painfully sensitive to ridicule. In their own
country, in the past, their military traditions,
the closely drawn limitations between classes,
the prompt vengeance of slight or insult, made
the rules of politeness to one another as rigid,
and their ceremonious treatment of one another
as elaborate, as religious rubrics.

Both the Koreans and the Chinese look upon
the Japanese as inferior. The Koreans call
them "island savages," "foreign knaves," and
their country "Contemptible Dwarf Land," and
the Chinese call them "monkeys," and both
consider them as even more contemptible than
Europeans.

I grant that it has a tendency to make a man
self-conscious, and awkward, and inclined to
self-assertion, when he finds himself in a com-
pany that is latently unfriendly, even if he be a
superior person of long training in self-control.

I have seen both Manchus and Koreans make
fun of the little Japanese soldiers and policemen,
and it is perhaps not to be wondered at that they
retaliate with physical force. They do not like
chaff, and do not know how to take it; and they
are very new, one may even say, very raw, at
the business of exercising authority. The white
man, indeed the gentleman everywhere, assumes

456 THE WEST IN THE EAST

his authority, he does not assert it. But one
must be very sure of oneself to do this success-
fully, and the Japanese are not sure of them-
selves by any means. Almost any Japanese is
delighted to be mistaken for a European, puts
himself indeed to great pains to imitate his
institutions, his clothes, his manners, his hab-
its, and to learn his language, and has none of
the Chinese indifference to, and contempt for.
Western standards of civilization.

No man ever does anything well if he is for-
ever looking out of the cornei of his eye to see
if he is copying his model successfully. The
Japanese give you the impression of watching
to see if you think they have done things the
way they ought to be done, whether it is eating
their dinner, drinking their wine, tying their cra-
vats, choosing their hats and coats, or governing
their colonies. This uneasiness about their own
manners and methods, about their right to the
pre-eminence that they have claimed, cannot be
concealed from those they are attempting to rule;
and as I have said elsewhere, the nervous rider
makes the excitable horse.

This governing of aliens demands a superior
all-round man, and one who possesses in par-
ticular great nervous staying power. The con-
stant pin-pricks, the malicious misinterpreta-

JAPAN 457

tions, the steady opposition, the daily and
studied efforts at circumvention, are irritating
and nerve-racking. Even the stolid English-
man in India finds it health-destroying. It has
had the effect upon some of the stout little
Japanese of breaking them down, making ner-
vous wrecks of them. I know of more than one
Japanese official recalled already from these
new colonies, completely broken down nervously.
Men who could stand the gruelling hardships of
a winter campaign in Manchuria, and lose no
weight even, waste away under the burdens of
the complicated business of governing peaceably.
Fighting is merely an exciting form of exercise,
but governing is the very rarest accomplishment
of the most highly trained men, of the most
advanced civilizations.

The disease known to us as beri-beri, and
called by the Japanese Kake, which is a malady
of the nerves, resulting in paralysis and numb-
ness, is common in Japan. It played such
havoc in both army and navy that its causes
have been seriously investigated. In the navy,
after certain experiments, the surgeon-general
prescribed a change of diet, giving the men
more meat, bread, vegetables, and less rice. It
may be of Interest to our Uptonian school of re-
formers and their allies, the social and political

458 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST

Saprophagans, to learn that Chicago canned
meat was added to the daily rations of the Jap-
anese navy and army, and helped to stamp out
this dread disease.

The Japanese copy quickly, but they learn,
which is quite another thing, slowly. Accord-
ing to the present school system, a boy enters the
primary school at the age of six, and stays six
years; at the age of twelve he goes to a middle
school where he stays five years; at seventeen
he goes to the high-school for three years, and
thence to the university for a three or four years'
course. If no time is wasted, and there are no
failures at examinations, a boy may graduate
from the university at twenty-three or four, but
most boys are not so fortunate. They are par-
ticularly weak in mathematics, and a large per-
centage of the failures throughout the school
and university courses are in this department.
The result is that many boys do not finish their
education before the age of twenty-eight, or
thirty, even. It is to be remembered that this
is an Oriental race, and the men are old men at
fifty. With us, a man who has taken care of
himself is in his prime at fifty, and the respon-
sible and onerous work of our Western world is
done by men between forty-five and seventy.
We have, the best of us, forty years of usefulness

JAPAN 459

between twenty and sixty. The Japanese, with
exceptions, of course, have twenty-five, between
the years twenty-five and fifty. If the most
valuable thing in life is stored-up experience,
well used, the Japanese, and all Orientals, are
at a tremendous disadvantage in this respect.

There are three questions uppermost in the
minds of intelligent people Lq regard to the
Japanese: are they really civilized, have they
incorporated our civilization, got it in their
blood, or merely grasped certain features of it
with their deft hands .?* will the alliance with
Great Britain be renewed .? are they contem-
plating, and will they be successful in an attack
upon us ? My own answers to these questions,
and I have tried to avoid being categorical, will,
I trust, be found in what I have written. All the
sober-minded Japanese maintain that not only
have they adopted our civilization, but that they
are putting it into a crucible from which will
emerge a higher form of civilization than that
to which we have attained in the West. They
regard the non-renewal of their alliance with
Great Britain as improbable in the present
timorous state of mind of British statesmen.
They were unanimous in telling me, an Ameri-
can, that war between America and Japan is
preposterous, impossible for financial and stra-

460 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tegical reasons, and that Germany is at the
bottom of all these false alarms, and incentives
to quarrels between her rivals and enemies;
insisting, and I believe with justice, that Ger-
many is now in a position where war between
any other two countries would profit her, weaken
some rival, and be to her commercial advan-
tage.

Few men of importance would willingly make
war, incite to war, or believe in war. No one
not crazed by the thought of personal revenge
would: "Pour the sweet milk of Concord into
hell." Those who have seen anything of the
horrors of war detest it; amateurs in uniform,
with staff-appointment military titles, may be
pardoned for wishing to appear as brave as their
uniforms.

I was bored by Philippics as a boy in col-
lege, and my re-reading of the classics after pass-
ing thirty increased my distaste for them. I
should be disappointed and sorry to have what
I write of Japan interpreted as a wholesale
denunciation, as a swaggering sort of ceterum
censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. I am no
sour Cato.

I am, however, of those who believe that the
best arguments for peace are those well fur-
nished with men, arms and ammunition, and

JAPAN 461

that the ambassadors from a careless, rich, and
defenceless country seeking to bring about an
international court of arbitration, though it is of
all things most to be desired, must necessarily be
impotent envoys.

There is no more doubt that both Germany
and Japan look with envy upon the rich and
thinly populated countries of South America, and
that Japan has entered Manchuria to stay, than
that Germany and Japan are over-populated.
The thin mantle of the Prince of Peace conceals
fang and claw only until the opportunity for
profit, or the pangs of hunger, induce us to throw
it off. It would seem that our bureaus of agri-
culture, our schools of technology are useless
without Annapolis and West Point. The splen-
did gift of Mr. Carnegie for the advancement of
peace does honor to every Christian and to every
American, but that travelled and intelligent
gentleman would be the last to advocate the
sending of emissaries for peace, with the halters
of disarmament and defencelessness around
their necks.

The cost of even the moral progress we have
made has been terrible; and it is not false
pride, but protection for our ideals, that bids us
defend ourselves from what we consider lower
forms of morals, religion, manners and customs.

462 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It is astounding that England and America do
not see that Japan is Materialism proving its
efficiency. The Japanese are smiling atheists
and agnostics, and yet at one time America and
Europe were hailing with admiration their sanity,
happiness, morality, and ability. At any rate,
that attitude means good-by Christianity, and
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Exeter Hall,
must be very frivolous or very ignorant if they
preach a renewal of the alliance in 1915. These
people would make Darwin, Spencer, Wallace
and Haeckel point in triumph. Not one of the
sanctions or authorities of Christendom has con-
tributed to their success or to their present
civilization. It is purely material, touched up
with ghostly awe of ancestordom. If they and
their gods, their woman slavery, their historical
and commercial untrustworthiness, their Ori-
ental secretiveness and cruelty, their imitative
militarism, their tyrannical and unrepresenta-
tive government of themselves and their con-
quered aliens can be received on equal terms
by England and America, then Christ is a mere
ethical luxury, and no more necessary to our
civilization than the "private god" of my
Hindu friend in Udaipur.

XI

THINGS JAPANESE, KOREAN. AND
MANCHURIAN

FROM Hongkong to Yokohama ought not
to be a long or a disturbed voyage. I
travelled on rather a small steamer to
avoid waiting for a large one, and from the mo-
ment we steamed away from the dock at Hong-
kong till we were warped alongside at Yoko-
hama, the description of the sea by Horace,
"inverso mare," was fulfilled to the letter. Seven
days of "inverso mare," unrelieved by eruptive
illness, which is a blessing in disguise in such
situations ; during which time I read for the first
time in many years, a shelf or so of modern
novels, made me acquainted at least with the
opiumonic quality of such literature. These
days left me also with increased respect for
Horace as a realist. Verily nothing is so power-
less as water till it gets into motion !

It was a rainy, blustering morning when we
arrived ; and I watched with interest the Japan-
ese who handled the ropes and cables thrown to

463

464 THE WEST IN THE EAST

them. They were skilful and quick, and some-
what uncanny in appearance; long arms and
long bodies on short sturdy legs; long upper lips,
dark, opaque eyes, and an air of doing what they
had to do, as of trained animals. No one, I
imagine, who first comes in contact with the
Japanese, is not impressed by their unhuman
appearance, and their mental and moral aloof-
ness, and difference from any other race of the
same ability he knows.

The custom-house examination was prolonged,
patient and rigorous, but my luggage was passed
as inoffensive, and, tucked into a jinrickisha w, I
was trotted off to the hotel. The first glimpse of
the interior of the hotel told me, as though it had
been proclaimed by the hotel clerk, that here
the influence of America is paramount. The
steam-heat, and the hall filled with rocking-
chairs, proved it. What combination more
tempting to physical and mental, and conse-
quently to moral, degeneration can be made
than a rocking-chair and a cheap novel in a
steam-heated room! There they were, includ-
ing the degeneration; for in one of the chairs
was an over-plump countrywoman, looking as
though she were choked by her stays, a novel
in her hands, and her high heels tapping the
floor, as the chair swayed back and forth.

THINGS JAPANESE 465

Two Japanese in livery take my things to
my room, and when I arrive a few yards behind
them, they are both smirking at themselves in the
mirror. There are many bitter criticisms of the
Japanese these days, and one of the foremost is
that they are conceited. That may be, but
there is another aspect of the case deserving
mention. They are new at the game of civiliza-
tion. The grinding monotony of life, which is
the portion of a great and helpless majority in
every highly civilized society, has not thrown its
pall over them as yet. They carry luggage to
an hotel room, they wait on table, they run
locomotive engines and trolley-cars, wave flags
from the crossings at passing trains, bow for-
eigners in- and out of shops, and wait upon them
from behind counters; they take and sell
tickets at railway stations, do housework, serve
as guides and couriers, travel themselves ia
trains and ships, wear uniforms as firemen,
policemen, soldiers, sailors, teachers, judges,
school-boys, — Japan has veritably blossomed
iuto uniforms — govern colonies as in Formosa,
Korea and Manchuria, and all with the de-
lighted alertness, and with sidelong glances at
themselves in mirrors when opportunity offers,
as of children playing with new toys.

The traveller and student of foreign men and

466 THE WEST IN THE EAST

manners, who falls into the error of supposing
that his personal opinions are necessarily dog-
mas because they are intolerant, is of no value
as a guide or teacher. These Japanese maybe
conceited, but the outstanding feature of their
society is their delighted interest, their air of
importance, their solemnity in doing the thou-
sand and one little things that we have done,
and seen done so often, that we are tired of
them, and only do them under the stress of
compulsion.

I have seen a Japanese using a telephone, or
a type-writer, punching tickets at a railway
gate, waving a flag at a crossing, pointing out
sights to travellers, with the smiling delight and
curiosity of a child looking at the inside of a
watch. I am not sure that this unsophisticated
attitude toward life is not as worthy as reading
a novel in a rocking-chair, in a steam-heated
room.

Germans complain that the French are con-
ceited, and prone to ridicule others; Americans
accuse the English of being conceited ; and as for
the English, they simmer slowly but constantly
with amusement at our boasting, our proclama-
tions, our Fourth-of-July oratory. Perhaps we
all think the Japanese conceited, because we
think they ought not to be; assuming that our

THINGS JAPANESE 467

ideals and our accomplishments are the only
proper standards of measurement. None of us
would be less agreeable for more humility; and
we should certainly all be gainers if before pass-
ing judgment upon others, we first studied them
more carefully. More than half the distrust be-
tween one another, of the nations of the earth, is
due to nothing more mysterious than just plain,
complete, and indifferent ignorance.

There are two places in every country and
every city, one where the traveller should spend
a few hours in studying the mass, the average;
and in the other the picked few. Those two
places are the railway stations and the book-
shops. In Bombay and Calcutta books on the
French Revolution, on Poland's struggle for
freedom, Herbert Spencer on Education and
Ethics were in demand. Here is the list from
a Japanese book-shop: "Evolution and Adap-
tation," Morgan; "Electricity and Magnetism,"
Webster; "Theory of Heat," Cotter; "Dar-
winism," Wallace; "Pioneers of Science,"
Lodge; "Fruit Growing," Bailey; "Fairy Land
of Science," Lodge. Mills's "Representative
Government," a volume of five hundred pages
in Japanese, has reached its fourth edition.
When I visited the University at Tokio, the
President told me that the popular courses

468 THE WEST IN THE EAST

among the five thousand students there were
engineering, medicine, lectures on the physical
sciences, and law. Rightly or wrongly, they
have picked out our material successes as best
worth studying and imitating; and they have
thrown themselves into the study and practice
of these things with the enthusiasm and aban-
don of amateurs, to whom it is aU fresh and
new and exciting.

It is a commonplace to retail the facts and
figures of their increased commerce and ship-
ping, their growing navy, their successfully
tested army, their use of modern inventions of
all kinds and the development of mills and fac-
tories and ship-buUding plants at Osaka, Yoko-
hama, Tokio, Kioto, Kobe, Nagasaki, Hako-
date and elsewhere; and their mining activities
in Japan, and in Korea and Manchuria as well.
The important thing to get at is not this
material advancement that stares one in the face
everywhere, and which may be found in detail
in any year-book, but whether it is real and last-
ing, and whether these amateurs who have
stepped boldly into the ring have the mental,
moral and the physically nervous staying power
to stand the strain of it all. Thus far an oli-
garchical government has succeeded in transfer-
ring the old clan allegiance of the Daimyos, and

THINGS JAPANESE 469

their followers the Samurai, to the Mikado.
The same obedience, self-sacrifice and dutiful-
ness have been relied upon to take up and carry
on this material and military expansion. The
personal allegiance has been translated into
patriotism; but an office stool, the cab of a loco-
motive-engine, tending mill machinery, building
railroads and bridges, supervising the tiresome
routine of commercial transactions, are worlds
away from serving and fighting for a lord, who
occupies the position toward his followers of
both father and ruler.

Our Western journals have treated the recent
attempt upon the life of the Japanese Emperor
as though it were similar in kind and of no
greater importance than an attempt of the same
kind upon a Western ruler. It is as different
as an attempt upon the life of the Maharana of
Udaipur by Hindus, or upon the life of the Pope
by Catholics, is different from an attempt upon
the King of Italy by Italians. In the latter case
it is a mad expression of discontent, in the
former it is a stab at the heart of a semi-religious
Hindu potentate, or of Japan's god. What re-
ligion and a moral code, backed by the united
sentiments of our best citizens, do to keep us in
order, this allegiance to the Mikado does for
Japan. It is an ominous sign indeed if Mills's

470 THE WEST IN THE EAST

"Representative Government," or Spencer's
"Ethics," has upset the Japanese loyalty, which
far more than any other factor supplies the driv-
ing power for their progress and success. It
seems to have passed unnoticed even, except, I
believe, by one correspondent of an American
journal, that a special tribunal was necessary to
try the case, as the crime was so outside the
realm of the conceivable in Japan, that no Jap-
anese court was so constituted as to be availa-
ble for the trial of such an offence. In another
chapter, written before this attempt upon the life
of the Japanese Emperor, I suggested the grave
danger to orderly social and political progress in
Japan, once the badly digested rationalism of the
West succeeds in making inroads among these
people of superficial political training. They
are agnostic to begin with, and once the mythical
cords that have bound them, in blind faith, to
obedience to the spirits of the ancestors of the
Mikado are strained and broken, and the in-
dividual recognizes no law higher than his own
will, the small knot of elder statesmen who now
rule Japan will have a serious problem to meet.
It will not be merely the problem of rationalism
and anarchy which faces us all; but it will be
the problem of substituting a new driving power
for all their military, commercial, and industrial

THINGS JAPANESE 471

forces, and a new bond to hold the people to-
gether as a nation.

The attempt upon the life of the Emperor of
Japan, led by a Japanese who had studied in
America, and who had edited a newspaper there,
is the most momentous thing that has happened
in Japan in half a century. It strikes at the
very root of all that makes and keeps Japan a
nation. It weakens Japan's heart, and dilutes
the purity and fervor of patriotism at all the
extremities. A rent has been made in the veil
hiding the mystery which every Japanese fears,
worships and obeys, and we superficial ob-
servers in the West have passed it by without
so much as an inkling of its real significance.
It can only be likened in its effects upon the
nation to the change of feeling here, if we should
suddenly become possessed of a craze for matri-
cide.

Tokio is only some eighteen miles by train
from Yokohama. Tokio is spread over a dis-
proportionate area for its population, and the
distances when measured by jinrickishaw speed
are great. It is not a capital city in our sense.
There are many buildings of stone and streets
of shops, there are jangling trolley-cars and elec-
tric lighting, but by far the greater part of the
area of Tokio is covered with small, cheap houses

472 THE WEST IN THE EAST

of the flimsy architecture common in Japan.
There is an air o£ unkemptness about the city,
as of a shabby-genteel town assuming the air of
greatness and prosperity. But redeeming every-
thing else at this particular season are the cherry
trees in full bloom.

There is nothing quite like these avenues of
pink blossoms in the streets and in the parks;
and nothing at all like the national pride and
pleasure in them, of all the people, old and young,
and of every social grade. There are pilgrim-
ages and picnics to the parks and other places
where the blooms are seen to best advantage.
The Emperor's garden-party, given in honor of
the height of the cherry-blossom season, is a
matter for much coming and going of high offi-
cials of state, of much discussion of the weather,
and of much debate as to the exact day to choose,
when the blooms will be at their best. It is a
great function, this garden-party, and the cour-
tesy of our distinguished ambassador to Japan
procured me an invitation, which I was obliged
to decline. The time-table of the Trans-Sibe-
rian railway and my days, engaged weeks in ad-
vance, and full at that, prevented my waiting.
At Kobe, however, I saw a Cherry-Dance, and
nowhere in the East a more lovely succession
of scenes in color.

THINGS JAPANESE 473

Before the Cherry-Dance in the theatre proper,
there was a Tea Ceremonial, or Cha No Yu.
It is claimed that four or five years of training
and tuition are necessary to arrive at proficiency
in all the intricacies of this ceremony. In this
case it lasted an hour. All the innumerable
utensils for tea-making are brought in and
placed in position with great solemnity, and with
much manoeuvring and bowing. The attend-
ants, or acolytes, are little girls in brilliant ki-
monos and obis, all of them painted and pow-
dered. Finally a gorgeous professional, escorted
by the whole band of acolytes, her face painted,
her eyebrows pencilled, her hair oiled and shin-
ing, and dressed over and around a mass of huge
combs, clad in a marvellous and, as I was in-
formed, priceless garment, and embroidered on
it in gold a splendid yellow dragon five feet
long, shu£Bes into the room and seats herself to
make the tea. Every move and gesture is cal-
culated and prescribed, and after countless
solemn manipulations of the utensils the steam
rises, the water is poured, the tea is made. The
guests numbering a hundred or more are
seated on mats on the floor. After this chief-
priestess has performed her part, she leaves the
room, and another woman, clad in similar
splendor, takes her place and serves the tea.
The cups are passed by the little girls, who, after

474 THE WEST IN THE EAST

handing you your cup, bend down and touch
the floor with their foreheads, and you are sup-
posed to do likewise in return. The tea was a
green powder, of acrid flavor and quite unlike
the tea served on ordinary occasions in Japan.
Wherever one goes, to a private house, to a shop,
to a school, to call on the Minister of War, to
visit the President of the University, to the
cavalry school, always, at whatever time of the
day, tea is served ; an agreeable and wholesome
custom, for it is little more than a pleasantly
flavored cup of hot water, and one can hardly
drink too often or too much of that.

Havuig finished our tea, the doors were opened
and a rush was made for seats in the theatre.
The Japanese have not adapted their old-time
courtesy and gentle manners to the new con-
ditions of a steam and electricity handled popu-
lation. Such a scramble as these people made
to get through the narrow door and up the
narrow stairs! Neither women nor children
were regarded by the men. At the railway
stations, in the street-cars, in the shops, on the
sidewalks where there are any, at restaurants
and in dining-cars, their lack of consideration,
their crowding, shoving and loathsome habits
are painful to see. Their bowing and kow-
towing in hotels and shops, and along the Cook
itinerary, is as though one should judge the

THINGS JAPANESE 475

manners of the English or the Americans bj the
demeanor of the assistants in fashionable shops
in London or in New York. The faded man-
ners of the floor-walkers in our great shops,
who point prospective buyers to guns, garters,
or gum-drops with impartial animation, are not
the mirror which reflects our average behavior
to one another.

Foolish foreigners fancy that these funny
Japanese bows, this staccato protruding of the
salient part of the back of the person, accom-
panied by the exaggerated lowering of the head
to the level of the waist, many times repeated, is
a form of prostration before their superiority.
It is nothing of the kind. It is no more than a
touching or a lifting of the hat, and is a per-
functory performance that we misinterpret as
an acknowledgment of subserviency. To tell
the truth our manners are mostly so awkward,
so self-conscious, and so bad, that we have come
to look upon any manners at all as grotesque
and slightly ridiculous. "While we are smiling
perhaps disdainfully at the ceremonious polite-
ness of the Japanese, they, and with far more
reason, are contemptuous of our stiffness and
awkwardness.

The spectacle in the theatre depicted the four
seasons with appropriate dances for each. We

476 THE WEST IN THE EAST

were in the gallery facing the stage. The gal-
leries along the sides of the theatre were oc-
cupied by the musicians, all women, armed
with triangles, small hand-drums and the three-
stringed banjo, called the Samisen. This favor-
ite instrument was only introduced into Japan
from Manila as late as 1700. In front of these
sat the singers : on one side the sopranos, and on
the other the altos. One or two of the women
sang solos, accompanied by the rest as chorus.
One, a powerful contralto voice, was pleasant
to the ear; though the monotonous sing-song,
punctuated by recurring birdlike pipings, was
totally unlike any music we ever hear.

The dancing here, as elsewhere in Japan, is
rather posturing and posing than dancing. The
feet are seldom lifted from the floor, and the
pantomime is all done with twisting and turning
and bending of the body and waving of the arms.
It was the clever lighting, and the harmonious
colors of the dresses of the women, which made
the pictures beautiful. Whether the untamed
taste of Broadway, Leicester Square and Mont-
martre would find such gentle pantomimic
manoeuvres, brilliantly and beautifully colored
though they be, served with enough condiment,
I doubt. So much the worse for us!

Another evening I was the guest of a Japanese

THINGS JAPANESE 477

gentleman to dinner at a restaurant or tea-
house. We have no equivalent for these places,
and perhaps the cafes and smaller restaurants
of the Latin countries are more nearly of the
same service to the people. There is, of course,
the broad difference that these places in Japan
are served by women, and that women are in-
variably the entertainers. We were served in a
large, plain room, scrupulously clean, with no
furniture, and the floor covered with matting.
Two bronzes, a beautiful painted screen and
a sepia drawing by a modern Japanese artist
were there, and nothing else. We sat upon
cushions with an ash-filled brasier between us.
This brasier was not for warmth, but to light
the small Japanese pipes, and to receive the
ashes, when after two or three puffs they are
emptied. Five young dancing girls in bright
costumes, and some seven or eight others in
more sombre garb, entered, went down on their
knees before us, touching the ground with their
foreheads. Tea is brought in, and they sit in a
semicircle around us. The meal itself was a
procession of small dishes, brought in one or
two at a time and left. Whether you eat of
them or not, or whether more are brought, none
is taken away; so that before the meal is over
you are surrounded by as many as twenty

478 THE WEST IN THE EAST

dishes or more. Some of the features of this
particular meal were snail soup, sweets, raw
fish, various vegetables, carrots, beans, parsnips,
egg-plant, asparagus, young bamboo shoots,
sweet-potatoes, stewed meat, and all accom-
panied by frequent libations of sake out of tiny
cups. Each guest has a bowl of fresh water in
which he rinses his cup after drinking, fills
it, passes it to one of the women, who drinks,
rinses the cup, passes it back with a low bow,
and so on and so on. Sake is served warm, and
tastes like weak sherry. Whether it is intoxi-
cating or not, I did not discover. I must have
drunk dozens of these small cups of it on this
occasion, and at other similar functions that I
attended, but I never noticed that it had the
smallest effect.

During the meal some of the women thrum
the Samisen and others dance, alone or in pairs,
or the whole company together. During the
interval we are supposed to be entertained con-
versationally, and for aught I know to the con-
trary, there may be veritable Aspasias among
these butterfly-robed people. There is much
bowing and smiling and paying of compliments;
but making pretty speeches through an inter-
preter is much like icing vintage claret. As
they become more at their ease, they interest

THINGS JAPANESE 479

themselves in my watch, my cigar-case, my
eye-glass, and all want the bands from the
cigars. There is no solicitation, no buffoonery,
no coarseness. Their sisters of that profession
elsewhere are not so well-behaved. The dishes,
tasted, or untouched, or half-eaten, form a small
garden around us, and finally, after more tea,
our entertainers fall to and devour what is left.
One of them cuts the middle out of a piece of
bread — ^which had been provided for me — and
puts butter and mustard not only on it but
around it, and poses as being very sophisticated
in European ways of eating.

After sitting on one's hind legs for three
hours, with nothing to lean against, stiffness
joins the company. About 10.30 p. M. I ask
to be excused. I fear that I am not much of
a Japanese blade. They bow and smUe and
chatter as I leave, and my friend tells me that
they suggest that I marry them all and take them
to America; and I reply that nothing but our
drastic emigration laws prevent that happy
polygamous consummation of so pleasant an
evening.

Through the courtesy of the Minister of War,
I was escorted to the cavalry barracks, a few
miles out of Tokio, and spent some hours
watching the men, horses, and the drill in the

480 THE WEST IN THE EAST

riding-school. The Japanese census affirms that
there are some 1,300,000 horses in Japan. I
was so surprised at this that I wrote to the
Agricultural Department, asking if they would
confirm these figures. They replied that the
figures were as follows, sending me a detailed
statement of the number of horses of Japanese
breed, mixed breed and foreign breed in each
province, and putting the total at 1,494,506.
On looking up the figures for one province, I
found that there was one horse there for every
eight inhabitants, men, women, and children!
Where they keep these horses, unless they have
caves for them, it would tax the powers of the
most credulous traveller to discover. It is not
impossible that their strong desire to impress the
foreigners with their prosperity, and their ab-
normal weakness in mathematical matters, have
combined to exaggerate the number of Japanese
horses. Certainly an undeniably ludicrous out-
come of these particular weaknesses are the
figures for school attendance, where the state-
ment is made that for the year 1907-8 the per-
centage of those of school age attending school
was 97.38! As a matter of fact, the real per-
centage is about 72. I travelled nearly the
whole length of Japan, and visited every large
city, but I did not see a thousand horses in all,

THINGS JAPANESE 481

even including those at the cavalry barracks.
The climate, too, has a curious effect upon
foreign-bred horses imported into Japan, and
they die of a nervous disease that thus far has
not been remedied.

The Japanese is not a born horseman. The
cavalry lines were clean, the grooming seemed
to be thoroughly done, what I saw of it; but the
saddles were awkward affairs, and not always
in good repair, and of bitting a horse they
seem to know nothing. The horses I saw were
whalers or country-bred, with a few exceptions
that looked to be of better breeding. The work
in the school was elementary, and even the men
who had been at it longest were awkward horse-
men, and not at home in the saddle. But they
are plucky enough, there is no doubt of that.
A dozen of them, each with a different-colored
scarf, were sent racing across country, to pick
up a scarf corresponding in color, and return
with it. First they went down a fairly steep
hill with a small water-jump at the bottom, up
the opposite bank, there they dismounted to
pick up the scarf, then a hurdle or two, and back
to the starting-point at full gallop. One man
was thrown going down the hill, caught his foot
in his stirrup, was dragged some distance, but
clung to his bridle-reins, and only lost his horse

482 THE WEST IN THE EAST

when the reins broke. Even then, dazed and
stumbling, he started after his horse, and was
only finally persuaded to limp away by those
who ran to help him, when an officer ordered
him to do so. I walked out to have a look at
him, and found his face battered and bruised,
and in a condition which would have made most
men ask for a litter. Later, wearing masks and
padded, they opposed one another with single-
sticks. They were a happy, laughing crowd,
evidently enjoying their job, of an average age
of about twenty, and officers and men seemed
to be much on the same level and companion-
able.

It was during my visit to Japan that Sub-
marine Number 6 was lost, with all hands.
Lieutenant Sakuma, her commander, while he
was slowly suffocating, writes a detailed state-
ment of how it happened, praises his crew, and
recommends their families to the care of the state.
"Words of apology fail me," he writes, "for
having sunk His Majesty's Submarine Number
6. My brave men are doing their best." On
raising her, it was discovered that the machinery
was at fault, and the commander not wholly to
blame; but for sheer grit and courageous cool-
ness, we must give Lieutenant Sakuma his place
among the bravest of any nation.

THINGS JAPANESE 483

Thanks to the courtesy and kindness of the
American Ambassador, of Captain Brinckley —
the most valuable ally Japan possesses — Vis-
count Kaneko, the Prime Minister, Minister of
War, and the British and German ambassadors
in Tokio, I saw many things, and conveniently,
that otherwise I might not have seen at all. But
the details of a traveller's diary are perhaps less
interesting than the main features of the map
he draws as he goes along.

Everywhere, at the universities, the schools,
hospitals, military posts, in the few houses of
Japanese gentlemen I was privileged to see,
even in the streets, and the country one sees from
the car-window, one is impressed by the neat-
ness of it all. There seems to be no rubbish in
Japan anywhere. Even in a great manufact-
uring town like Osaka there is no untidiness.
Their tastes are still simple, their houses have
little furniture, their wardrobes are scanty as
compared to ours, and they know nothing as yet
of the squandering of luxury, and their women
are all workers and not wasters. They travel
through life with comparatively little baggage,
and they are a poor people. The salaries of
office-holders, teachers, army and navy officers
and professional men generally, are wofuUy small.
Our race, however, produces many poor who are

484 THE WEST IN THE EAST

wasters, tempted into carelessness because pub-
lic or private philanthropy is enthusiastic in its
care of the careless; but the Japanese combine
neatness and economy to an extent unknown
even in France and Belgium.

I had expected to find the English language
spoken by a few well, and smatteringly by many,
in Japan. Certain of their officials do speak
the language well, but many do not. As for the
English of most of the scholars, and some of the
school-teachers, it is not English at all. The
Japanese are dismissing as rapidly as possible all
foreigners whom they have employed to train
them in Western ways, from professors and
school-teachers, to engineers, draughtsmen and
foremen in mills and factories. This is done
partly from motives of economy, and partly be-
cause here, and as I believe in almost all other
departments of life, they feel themselves to be
capable of going it alone. Though the philolo-
gists say that the Japanese language is not related
to the Chinese, the Japanese have adopted a
large number of Chinese words, and all their new
words are from the Chinese, just as we make
new words from the Latin and Greek. This
accounts for the fact that the Japanese and
Chinese can communicate by the written signs
Common to both, though they do not understand

THINGS JAPANESE 485

one another's speech. If the Japanese continue
to be taught English as now they are taught, we
shall be able to communicate by our written
language; but the English we speak and the
English they will speak eventually, will be so
totally different that we shall not be able to
understand one another's speech. In a dozen
or more schools I visited the class-rooms where
English or French was being taught. Without
the text before you it would have been impos-
sible to follow the spoken English or the spoken
French. A Japanese youth taught English by
a Japanese, who then teaches another Japanese,
lands the last of the three with a pronunciation
of English, which makes him unintelligible in
that tongue. This seems to be carrying one's
independence of foreign aid to an absurd pitch.
All their schools have military training, and
there they are in advance of us. Athletics took
the place of enforced physical training when
we had a small population more agricultural
than manufacturing, out-door workers rather
than houseworkers, and our public schools con-
tained children of all classes. This is not the
case now that we have a population larger than
any other country except China, India, and
Russia. Our athletics, splendid training though
they be, only help a comparatively small number;

486 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and leave out unfortunately just those who most
need careful physical supervision and training.
Every school and university in our country
ought to have compulsory physical drill of some
sort; and we are wasting time and money on
hygiene and hospitals, in fabulous amounts and
to little purpose, until we begin at the beginning
with our children and youths.

Of travel in Japan, the most noticeable feat-
ure to me was the positively startling disregard
of the Japanese travellers for Western conven-
iances. In so many other departments of life
they are making a point of putting the best foot
forward, and of showing off their Europeaniza-
tion, but in the trains apparently they forget
themselves. They take their shoes off and sit
curled up, or sprawled out upon the seats (not
those with Japanese foot-wear alone, when it is
natural and cleanly enough, but those wearing
European shoes) ; they hawk, spit, yawn, and
stretch, and after luncheon several of the men
indulged in loud belching audible the length of
the car. Men and women go to the lavatory,
leaving the door open; they take children there,
and then bring them back, and clean their least
presentable parts in the middle of the car; and
suckle them with no pretence of veiling the proc-
ess. The eating of some of the men in the dining-

THINGS JAPANESE 487

car was like the hungry gobbling and bolting of
a dog. They seemed to love meat, probably
because they rarely get it, and ate it, some of
them, in great quantities. One man arrived in
the dining-car in his shirt-sleeves, and began
spitting on the floor. The floor of the main car,
after an hour or so, was covered with ashes,
orange-peel, stumps of cigars and cigarettes,
and in the midst of this chaos was heard the
snores of one or two sleepers. I have never
been so nearly acquainted with the habits of a
monkey-cage, as in some of the Japanese rail-
way carriages. I am not a fussy traveller.
Neither my digestion nor my disposition was
disturbed by these things. I note them as com-
ments upon the rather mawkish praise of Japan-
ese manners that one hears from short-sighted
idealists. Indeed I was so surprised at the
manners of the Japanese when at their ease,
that I called the attention of my Japanese friend
to these incidents, one after another, saying to
him: "You know if this were written down, the
writer would be accused of exaggeration."

The traveller should see Nikko, Lake Chu-
zenji, Arashi-yama, the rapids of the brawling
river and the mountain; the mountain of Fuji,
the Inland Sea, Miyajima, and of course much
more besides; but these because he sees things

488 THE WEST IN THE EAST

there which are beloved of the Japanese, and
he gets something of the Japanese point of view
as regards scenery. Even the fields, and the
landscape seen from car-windows, are divided
like the patterns of a carpet. Here and there
patches of the yellow rape seed and the lighter
and darker shades of green, make the fields look
as though they had been sown purposely, not
for crops, but for color. The neatness, the sym-
metry, the small scale of everything may prove
disappointing at first, but he will end by appre-
ciation. This is the unique feature of Japanese
landscape, as of Japanese art and life. The
mountain, Fuji, looks like a colossal ant-heap,
and is as smooth and symmetrical as though
it had been patted into shape by hand. At
Nikko, the ravines, cascades, small streams, the
temples and shrines and walks and gardens, are
on the most diminutive scale. The mausolea
of leyasu, the first Shogun, and of his grandson,
and the innumerable temples, are so small that
one is at first inclined to resent coming so far to
see so little. But the workmanship is almost
tiresome in its minute intricacy. The lacquer,
the carving, gold, copper, bronze, gilt, all in pro-
fusion, and all worked smooth and in perfection
of detail, these and the lanterns of carved stone,
iron and bronze, are things one expects to see in

THINGS JAPANESE 489

a jeweller's shop rather than exposed in the open
air, and made to seem all the tinier by the groves
of truly magnificent cryptomeria which sigh and
sob above them.

I happened upon one of the temples on the
day of an anniversary. The Buddhist abbot
and his priests in two rows, squatting opposite
one another, were reciting and reading prayers
antiphonally. The Shinto priest, at a little
distance from the others, was participating by
his presence. It sounded like mumbling and
groaning and hiccoughing to me, but possibly
our disjointed praying in haste, would seem
weird enough to them.

This temple was a huge box of lacquer, ex-
aggeratedly ornamented, and only large enough
to contain a dozen or so of people. The temple
of Higashi-Hongwanji, at Kioto, was built as
lately as 1895. It cost $500,000 to build, and
this amount was contributed in small sums, by
the peasants and small farmers of the surround-
ing provinces. This would indicate no decay of
the ancient religious fealty. There are some
195,000 Shinto shrines in Japan, and many of
Japan's great men have temples dedicated to
them. The tale is told of it, that the timbers
were lifted into place by ropes made of human
hair contributed by pious women. It was

490 THE WEST IN THE EAST

fresher than the others, and brilliant in black
and gold, but no more ambitious in architecture,
and less careful, it seemed to me, in delicacy of
workmanship. At Kioto, too, is one of the huge
heads of Buddha, some sixty feet high, a gro-
tesque affair; although the Daibutsu, or great
Buddha of bronze at Kamakura, not far from
Yokohama, is an imposing monument. Like the
pyramids and the Sphinx, it imposes upon our
restlessness by its unmeaning stability. Just to
last for centuries, asking nothing, answering
nothing, explaining nothing, doing nothing,
brings us up sharp, and face to face, with the
consciousness of how fugitive we are, and how
quickly the traces of the wisest and strongest of
us are obliterated. What an offence such a
monument must be to a citizen of Chicago or
Winnipeg!

At the Art Museum at Kioto is a portrait of
a priest named Fuku Souzo, said to have been
painted by the Chinese artist Choshikyo in the
twelfth century. If it is genuine and has not
been touched up by a later hand, it is one of the
marvels of portraiture of that age, and bears
comparison easily with any portraiture work of
the same time in Europe. Japanese painters,
whether of screens or of kakemonos, had the
best to copy from in the work of the Chinese

THINGS JAPANESE 491

artists of the days when they were pupils of the
Chinese. At a well-assorted and well-arranged
special exhibition at the British Museum last
year, the history and development of Japanese
art was shown in a series of examples of Chi-
nese and Japanese paintings and drawings.
The Japanese have not improved upon their
teachers.

These temples and the grounds around them,
whether the Buddhist temple of Asakusa Hwan-
non, near Tokio, or at Nara, Kioto, Nikko, or
elsewhere, are picnic and pilgrimage resorts. In
thte rooms of some of them you may smoke and
have tea; at others you may buy for a small
sum a slip of paper with your fortune told on it;
you may rub a wooden image to ward off disease ;
you may throw money or darts of paper at a
wire screen in front of an image; if it goes
through your prayer is favorably answered;
there are tea-houses, moving-picture exhibitions,
theatres, side-shows of all sorts; in a word, re-
ligion is complacent, the gods may be wooed by
worldly methods, the mysteries remain mysteries,
but the powers are accommodating; the thou-
sands of small wooden slabs nailed up with the
names of donors on them, which one sees in all
these places, denote that there is a cheerful ex-
pectation of rewards in return for gifts.

492 THE WEST IN THE EAST

It is all as open and gay and bright and child-
ish as a sunny day in the nursery, when it is
decided to play at church. One may see in
Spain bright posters announcing the next bull-
fight posted on the walls of the churches ; Trust
magnates build churches and support parsons
in America; the House of Commons, to a man,
subscribes to a benefit for a prize-fight; murder-
ers in Italy present candles to favorite saints to
avoid detection, and poisoners become popes,
and have nephews and nieces. One must go
slow, and know many lands and many peoples,
and the manners and morals of them, before one
prances forth on one's provincial prejudices, to
set the world to rights.

This was borne in upon me when I attended
a Japanese theatre, with my intelligent Japanese
friend. A Japanese theatrical performance is
practically an all-day affair. You may go at
noon and stay till nine o'clock at night. An
agent will arrange for your seats, for tifl&n, tea,
dinner, cigarettes, sweets, and a hot bath, if you
want it, at a neighboring tea-house. During the
intervals you may walk about in the surrounding
shops. Families and parties come and camp
out comfortably for the day. I am at a loss to
know why this is supremely ridiculous, except
for the one barbaric reason that it is different.

THINGS JAPANESE 493

Did not the Athenians sit from six in the morn-
ing, for five to six hours at a stretch, and again
for hours in the afternoon to see a tragedy of
yEsehylus performed ? Who has not sat through
plays and operas, and monotonously vulgar
vaudeville performances at home, where a meal,
and a nap, or a bath, would have been consoling,
comfortmg, and far more profitable to body and
mind alike.

Three American girls and two American
youths sat not far from me. They pointed and
made remarks about their neighbors ; one of the
youths actually had a foot sprawling over the
railing of the box. The girls talked that cockney
jargon of silly slang, which is the mental accom-
plishment which goes with gum-chewing and
that intrepid wardrobe, which is low and per-
forated at the neck and shoulders, and tight to
bursting over the hips. The slender, pale-faced,
cigarette-inhaling youths wore clothes with
padded shoulders; in at the waist, out over the
hips, and in again at the ankles, which are only
produced, and only worn, by those who regard
linings of canvas and cotton-batting as an alto-
gether elusive way of concealing lack of breeding,
exercise, and proper feeding.

How the Japanese must misinterpret us when
they see such a group as this! They do not

494 THE WEST IN THE EAST

know that nowadays wealth and leisure to
travel are often at the disposal of the unedu-
cated, ill-mannered, ignorant, and self-assertive
of our race.

They do know the difference, however. A
distinguished Japanese member of the House of
Peers was commenting to me upon the mistake
so many of our men make, whether in diplomacy
or in commerce, in attempting to over-reach
rivals, hustling about for trade, striving at any
cost to get something tangible for their country.
"These are not the men who gain the valuable
and lasting things for your country," he said.
"They seem to, but it is not so. Your scholars
and gentlemen, your modest men, are those who
impress us most and win our most valuable
favors." Then he said: "I have always thought
it curious that of the three men I have known in
my career as statesman, at home and abroad,
whom I considered good, all were Americans."
One of these, I may say, was a certain Ameri-
can ambassador, who has entirely neglected to
advertise himself.

We have got it into our heads that diplomacy
nowadays demands a sort of political travelling
salesman. Nothing could be more fatal. Such
men are irritants rather than friend-makers ; and
not only in the East, but everywhere else, they

THINGS JAPANESE 495

are looked upon either as disguised drummers
for trade, or as the best an ignorant country can
send.

It is true, perhaps, that while the civilizations
of the East are ever analyzing fate, we of the
West are ever attempting to express and to
stamp our will ; but all the more reason for doing
this as quietly and as unobtrusively as possible.
I doubt if diplomacy ever gets anything of real
and lasting value by superior and cunning bar-
gaining.

If the foreign and domestic affairs of Japan
were regulated by such men as the gentleman I
have just quoted, and by men of the type of
Prince Ito and others, there would be little to
criticise. Even the taking of Korea is only in
line with our own policy toward Cuba, or Eng-
land's toward Burma.

Korea is a military and commercial necessity
to Japan, as any one may see who travels from
Tokio to Shimonoseki, and there takes steamer
across to Fusan, the southern port of Korea;
tiavels the length of Korea, from Fusan to the
Yalu River, and then through southern Man-
churia to Mukden, and then on to Kharbin.

Letters from Tokio paved my way for this
journey. I was oflBcially chaperoned by the
Japanese from the time I left Fusan, escorted

496 THE WEST IN THE EAST

to the railway station by the Japanese consul, till
I took the train at Kharbin for Moscow,

Everything that care and courtesy can do to
make a journey instructive and comfortable
was done. The trip across the water from
Shimonoseki to Fusan was on a fine steamer,
and is made in ten hours at slow speed, from
ten o'clock at night till eight the next morning.
From Fusan on a good broad-gauge railroad to
Seoul takes another ten hours, and from Seoul
to the Yalu River is a fourteen hours' journey.
The bridge across the Yalu River is half built,
and once the broad-gauge railway line from
Antung-Shien, on the Manchuria side of the
Yalu River, to Mukden is completed, the Japa-
nese will control the whole trade of Manchu-
ria. Treaties and tariffs and sentimental open-
doorism will avail nothing. There will be a
wide, well-kept open door to be sure, but with
Japanese in uniform as custom's officials, police-
men, and soldiers on both sides of it. Osaka
will then furnish southern China with piece
goods, and the middle China ore fields will be
tapped for the benefit of Japanese factories.
Japanese goods can be shipped in bulk from as
far as Tokio, to Mukden, to Kharbin, to Tien-
tsin, to Peking, and later, when the railway is
finished, not only to Shanghai, but to Canton.

THINGS JAPANESE. 497

Two more years, and you may go in a Pullman
car from Paris to Tokio; and as for freight,
steam ferries from Fusan to Shimonoseki will
enable a shipper to send goods in sealed cars
from Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna to
Tokio; and in the same manner from Tokio to
those capitals, if he wishes.

Korea may be of small value commercially;
but with Japanese industry and control, and
with modern agricultural machinery, Manchuria
will become another Canada, and feed all Japan
and more besides.

For many years to come, if these be the lines
of development, if these be the outlets for Japa-
nese energy and emigration, we in America have
nothing to fear either from coolie emigration nor
from military aggression. Only those who do
not know the situation ; who have not seen the
feverish activity of bridge and railway build-
ing; the pushing of Japanese settlers into and
through Korea and up into Manchuria; the
government refusal of passports to Japanese
wishing to go West; and the coaxing of Japan-
ese families and laborers into Manchuria, talk
of war as imminent.

During the year ending Junfe 30, 1908, 9,544
Japanese were admitted to the United States
(excluding Hawaii) ; while during the year end-

498 THE "WEST IN THE EAST

ing June 30, 1909, only 2,432 were admitted.
These figures include all Japanese, whether
laborers or not. For the year ending June 30,
1910, only 705 laborers were admitted to the
United States from Japan, all of whom were re-
turning laborers or parents, wives or children of
domiciled laborers. The immigration of Japa-
nese into Hawaii, from the year 1908 to the year
1909, decreased 83 per cent, and during the years
1909 to 1910 more Japanese left Hawaii than ar-
rived there. These figures show the trend of
events in Japan, and point straight to the real
interests, and the important task, which is in
Manchuria. Not even the most infatuated ad-
mirer of Japan, not even the most sensitive ob-
server of the signs of war, can believe that Japan
at this time can govern, settle and develop
Formosa, Korea and Manchuria, and occupy
the Philippines and our Western coast at the
same time. Russia has been appeased and
is quiescent, and China is still comatose for
the moment, but for years to come Japan will
have all she can do to consolidate her power
there-
Japan is heavily in debt, her resources are
small, and the tasks she has undertaken are
difficult, and until they are finished there will be
no returns, no dividends. She has use for all

THINGS JAPANESE 499

the money and all the men she can lay hands
on ; and for the present, at least, she has no use
for the Philippine Islands or for Alaska. Her
greatest difficulty now is her lack of first-class
trained men to do her work for her. She has
gone much too fast, not only in accepting new
burdens, but in dismissing her European ad-
visers and instructors, whether from conceit or
economy. Even the Chinese are dismissing
Japanese engineers and builders, and turning
again to Europeans, finding them in the long
run cheaper.

The taking over and control of Korea was
not a difficult task. Korea has a population of
about 10,000,000 of the laziest, the most good-
for-nothing Orientals in the world. For cen-
turies they have submitted to robbery, extortion,
and bullying from depraved rulers. As lately
as 1906 the Korean Emperor proposed a dis-
bursement of $600,000 for the suitable celebra-
tion of his wedding, this sum representing about
one-seventh of the total revenues of the country
for one year! Nearly one-half the population
to-day is without regular occupation. Even as
lately as 1895 it was indeed the "Hermit King-
dom," and an unknown land. The king and
an enormous court following treated the Kore-
ans like children, taxed them, beat them, and

500 THE WEST IN THE EAST

robbed them. Shiftlessness, indifference, and
moral recklessness were the result.

China, Russia, and Japan pulled the Korean
Emperor this way and that, until the strongest
and most persistent won, and now Korea is in
the hands of Japan, The export and import
trade of Korea in 1908 amounted to yen 55,138,-
833; both exports and imports have practically
doubled since 1904. Since the Japanese took
control, the rural house tax, for example, has
increased from 454,829 houses and yen 136,448
to 1,946,673 houses and yen 583,994. The
stamp receipts in 1905 were yen 1,860; in 1908
they were yen 120,972. Korea is now gar-
risoned by Japanese soldiers; there is a Japa-
nese police force, with a few Koreans in
subordinate places; the whole administration
system is being reorganized; there are Japanese
courts and judges; the revenues from mines
and forests and taxes, formerly monopolized
and wasted by the imperial household, are prop-
erly used; the legal age of marriage has been
raised to seventeen for men, fifteen for women;
and a sum of $10,000,000 granted to Korea for
needed reforms. Industrial schools, hospitals,
girls' and boys' high schools, normal schools,
many of which I visited, have been set going and
are well managed by the Japanese. At Seoul,

THINGS JAPANESE 501

the capital, I was taken through the law courts,
the prison, police stations, and I spent many
hours in class-rooms, saw the drilling of the
children in calisthenics, and all the machinery
of government, from a chat with Mr. Watanake,
"President de la cour supreme," down to the
thief brought in to the police station the night
before. All this means a tremendous, drastic,
and disagreeable change for the Koreans.

This miserable work-house civilization has
been turned out and made to begin earning a
living; the beggar and the tramp have been put
to work at the wood-pile. This population in
their baggy, formless white clothing, and their
horse-hair stove-pipe hats, living on highly sea-
soned cabbage, beans and rice; and wedded,
men, women and children, to their tobacco-pipes
as are no other people in the world, are being
prodded and pushed by their energetic conquer-
ors into some sort of regularity of life and work.
They hate it all as a tramp hates a tread-mill.
Prince Ito, the Japanese Lincoln, was assassi-
nated by one of them; and twenty-one of them
were awaiting trial, when I was there, for an
attempt on the life of the Prime Minister, in
November, 1909.

Korea has been a paradise for the missionary.
Nowhere else in the East has he made so many

502 THE WEST IN THE EAST

converts. It is not difficult to understand why.
These pliable, indifferent people, too lazy to de-
fend themselves from the extortion and tyranny
of their ruler and his horde of sycophant cour-
tiers, turned to the missionaries; and where the
robbery and cruelty were too flagrant they stood
up for and helped their converts. The Koreans
leaned back upon the missionaries, as they
would have leaned back upon anybody who
would support the burden of their cowardice
and laziness.

The Koreans, like the Chinese, respect the
student, the man of the book; and the man of
the book everywhere finds it easy to get a hear-
ing. The missionaries rehabilitated the simple
alphabetical language, which the Koreans had
spurned as the "Dirty Language." After four
hundred years of disuse, this, the simplest of all
the Eastern languages, was revived, and the
Bible printed in it, and the Koreans had the
New Testament to read as their first book. Un-
like the Japanese and the Chinese, the Koreans
were without a religion of form or ceremony, and
Christianity supplied that need. They had been
Confucians if anything, and Confucianism is a
mere code of morals, and with no more cere-
monial than the Ten Commandments. The mis-
sionaries appealed to the women particularly.

THINGS JAPANESE 503

They had been kept apart and secluded, much
as are the women of India. Then* rehgion had
been a form of Fetichism, the placating of, or
the fighting against, innumerable evU spirits.
Women were allowed to go to church by their
husbands, and grew to like the opportunities
for meeting and gossip. The word "gossip" it-
self means a sponsor at baptism. The women
on these occasions, by their chatter and spread-
ing of news, gave the word "gossip" the mean-
ing it now holds for us. Why should not Ko-
rean women like gossip as well as the Germans,
who gave the word its present significance.'' I
give these reasons to account for the success of
the missionaries in Korea, because it is entirely
untrue that the philosophy or the morality of
Christianity are alone responsible for the situa-
tion. On the contrary, I look upon it as any-
thing but a compliment to Christianity that the
most contemptible and supine race in the East
should be, of all others, and pre-eminently, the
race most attracted to Christianity. Out of
regard to the good name of our Western creed,
it should be explained that the tax-dodger, the
coward, the dependent, the shiftless, the bullied
foimd in the missionaries protection and care;
and it is not surprising that they followed and
fawned upon them, and became what the Chinese

504 THE WEST IN THE EAST

call "rice-Christians." Be it said, too, that the
missionaries deserve every credit for what they
have done. It is no slur upon them that the
morally blind, halt and lame have found com-
fort and solace and protection in them. It is
not, however, a matter for boasting.

In Mr. Gale's church I attended a service
where seven or eight hundred Koreans were
present, which was as apparently sincere, rever-
ent, and enthusiastic as any church service I
have ever attended anywhere. Alas, as is always
the case with great missionaries like Xavier, or
Bishop Brooks, of Massachusetts, or Bishop
Hall, of Vermont, and other great spiritual
leaders, they credit their followers with their
own devotion. Gale would have a following
anywhere, from the Bowery, in New York, to a
bazaar in Baroda. He is a man, that's all ; and
Korean enthusiasm and piety are merely his
character.

Now that the Japanese have taken over not
only Korea, and its taxes and administration,
but the Koreans and their affairs as well; now
that the taxation is fair to all alike, and justice
meted out to all alike; now that the Koreans are
finding that the missionaries cannot defend them
from the Japanese, as they defended them from
the extortions of their former rulers, there is a

THINGS JAPANESE 505

marked lessening of enthusiasm for Christianity.
The murderer of Prince Ito was a Christian
convert, and eighteeen out of the twenty-one
who made the attempt on the life of the Prime
Minister were also Christian converts.

It is a difficult situation for the missionaries,
for any effort by word or deed to improve the
Korean may be twisted into meaning encourage-
ment of his hatred of the Japanese. It is hard
indeed, if one may not preach to men to be men,
and independent men, without being suspected
of inciting one's hearers to sedition. On the
other hand, the Japanese might well take excep-
tion to an American missionary, who publishes
an account of how Prince Min, when he heard
that the Japanese were in control, committed
suicide, and concludes: "Written large around
his name Korea will ever read the sentence,
'Sweet and seemly is it to die for one's father-
land.'" No American missionary should be
permitted to publish such incendiary sentimen-
tality. Do Christians believe in suicide! Do
Christians believe in a prince who has shuffled
and twisted and shirked and brought his troubles
on himself by lazy debauchery, and then com-
mits suicide! No state department in any
country in Europe, or in America, can defend
such glorification of a mean-spirited prince, with

506 THE WEST IN THE EAST

its evident aim to show sympathy to the con-
quered and to incite to wrong-doing against the
conqueror. What would we do in Cuba, or in
the Philippines, to such an one ? I am not de-
fending the Japanese, but they are quite within
bounds if they suppress such talk and writing,
and that with a heavy hand; and no honest
American would have a word to say against it.

The Japanese, and it is one of his best traits,
holds self-control in the highest esteem. A
young Japanese noble writes in his diary:
"Dost thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred with
tender thoughts ? It is time for seeds to sprout.
Disturb it not with speech ; but let it work alone
in quietness and secrecy." Another writes:
"To give in so many articulate words one's
inmost thoughts and feelings, notably the re-
ligious, is taken among us as an unmistakable
sign that they are neither very profound nor
very sincere. Only a pomegranate is he who
when he gapes his mouth displays the contents
of his heart." The blatant and voluble Christian
will do well to take such good counsel to heart.

I admit that Japanese domination is hard
to bear. The soldiers, police, and lower class
Japanese generally, strut and swagger, and as
I have written already, are much too rough in
their often rude and unconciliatory methods.

THINGS JAPANESE 507

Not a single day passed while I was in Korea
and Manchuria that I did not see Koreans
and Manchus roughly handled. On the other
hand, from the director-general, chief-justice,
chief of police, commissioner of education, I
heard nothing but talk and plans for the better
government of Korea.

At Seoul, the director-general invited me to
a dinner of some twenty prominent oflBcials.
My shoes were removed at the door of the res-
taurant, and in my stocking feet I made my
bow to my host and his assembled guests. It
was a test of one's personal dignity and urbanity !
We sat on cushions on the floor. There was
nothing in the room but a single bush of
azaleas, which was placed at my right elbow.
We were served, and entertained with singing
and dancing and conversation, by Japanese and
Korean women. The long scroll with the names
of the dishes in Japanese and in English, which
is before me as I write, measures just one inch
short of five feet, and includes twenty-six dif-
ferent dishes. I may not give the entire list.
Some of the dishes were "snipe and young
ginger," "fish and sea-weed," "green vegetables
and Japanese soy," "eggs (spawn) of the tai
fish and edible ferns," "lobsters with sweetened
chestnuts," "red bean soup," "rice cake,"

508 THE WEST IN THE EAST

" cuttle-fish," "honey," "preserved fruits." The
snipe and ginger, the red bean soup, various
dishes of eggs, the edible ferns, and the preserved
fruits were excellent; and what with English,
French, and a little German, for some of my
fellow-guests spoke one language, some another,
the conversational ball was kept rolling. The
men were all intelligent, all interested in their
work, and all studiously polite to the only
stranger present. Not even the large banquet
in Tokio, where I met the Prime-Minister and
the famous General Kuroki, of Yalu River fame,
and many other celebrities, was more interesting.
It seemed to be the wish of the Japanese oflS-
cials that I should see everything, and although
the intention to annex Korea was denied, while
even then the preparations were under way, I
believe it is not the habit of diplomats and offi-
cials anywhere to play the pomegranate, and
open the mouth so freely that one may see the
contents of their hearts.

The comfortable route for those going from
Japan to Moscow, via the Trans-Siberian rail-
way, is to cross the Sea of Japan from Tsuruga
to Vladivostock, where the train starts; or one
may go to Dalny (Port Arthur) and take a train
there straight to Kharbin and join the train
there; or one may go all the way by train from

THINGS JAPANESE 509

Peking to Kharbin. If you wish to see the
heart of the Eastern question of to-day, however,
you will cross the Yalu River on the northern
border of Korea, and crawl along to Mukden,
on what remains of General Kuroki's crazy little
military railway, two feet six inches gauge, and
take the train there to Kharbin.

Leaving Seoul at nine in the morning, I ar-
rived at New Wiju at a little after eleven at
night. In order to be sure of the train next
morning, a Chinese junk was hired to take us
across the Yalu River, and the night was spent
in a Chinese inn at Antung-Shien. The next
morning at half-past seven we bundled into a
small box-car ten feet long, five feet wide, and
seven feet high, and with a band of all sorts,
including Chinese, Manchus, Japanese, drawn
by a diminutive locomotive engine built, I
noticed, by the Baldwin Locomotive Company,
we started.

I still look back upon that journey with sur-
prise and gratitude. The railway is of the
portable kind that can be laid quickly, and
there is no pretence of permanency; on the con-
trary, there were ominous and frequent indica-
tions of a tendency to disappear entirely. The
embankments are hastily thrown up, the bridges
are of logs loosely spiked together, and when

510 THE WEST IN THE EAST

one gets a glimpse of the line from the ear-
window, it looks like a ribbon carelessly thrown
across valleys, beside streams, and around moun-
tains. Often it seemed that we should roll
backward down a mountain, or that a shaky
bridge would give a last shake and let us through
into a torrent below; but the doughty little loco-
motive puffed, and wheezed, and grunted, and
pulled us along somehow. I saw forests that
mean a fortune, miles and miles of arable lands
that mean food, and I was told of mines of cop-
per and coal. We hardly travelled as fast as a
well-horsed road coach; we stopped wherever
there was a passenger; we picked up and de-
posited all sorts of freight; the seats were of
wood with no cushions; and when, as happened
from time to time, there were nine Japanese or
Chinese packed in the small carriage with me,
the situation was uncomfortable.

On such a crazy little line there is no travel at
night, and at sunset we halt at Sokakua and
spend the night in another Manchurian inn.
All through China and Japan, and wherever
Japanese influence extends, you can get a hot
bath, and at these resting-places I tumbled into
a hot bath and out, and into bed ; and one is too
tired to know whether one is uncomfortable or
not.

THINGS JAPANESE 511

Thirty miles from Mukden we reach Sakyoshi,
where the broad-gauge road has arrived on its
way to the Yalu River. To change into a car
of average size, and to move along at average
speed, and to have a seat aU to oneself, seemed
the height of luxurious travel. It is like the
change into a smoothly driven carriage, on a
good road, from a jaunting-car in Tipperary, in
rainy weather, with a broken-down thorough-
bred between the shafts, and a casual Irishman
handling the reins.

Even the dirty hotel in Mukden, to which we
are driven by a yelling Manchu, over roads of
mud and negligently placed boulders, seemed a
haven of rest after that railway journey, which I
may safely say is the worst railway journey in
the world. Mukden is an old Tartar town,
surrounded by a high wall, with wide gateways
and watch-towers. The population consists of
some 250,000, including 5,000 Japanese, and
about 150 Europeans. The Manchus, both
men and women, are stalwart-looking people;
and the women, with their coarsely dyed cheeks,
and the mirrors glittering in their carefully and
intricately dressed hair, are as independent, as
they walk the streets, as the men. Mukden was
the capital of the Manchu dynasty until the Man-
chus marched west and conquered Peking. Even

512 THE WEST IN THE EAST

now the palace is kept open, and in some sort
of repair, and there is a complete equipment of
officials. The present administration is in the
hands of a governor-general, who is also the
military governor. Eight months after my visit
the plague played havoc in Mukden and the
surrounding country. It is not to be wondered
at. Within these walls live a quarter of a million
people, disdaining all sanitary precautions, the
streets deep in mud or dust, the shops and
houses crowded together so that one might walk
from roof to roof, and the contents of the shops,
and of the open booths which line the streets,
exposed to the flying dust. They are a noisy
lot too, and from dawn till night the raucous
and piercing cries of the peddlers through the
streets, the rumbling of the heavy Pekinese
carts, the chatter of the crowds, make the place
a very bedlam.

Escorted by the Japanese military attache, I
was shown the palace buildings and the tombs
of the founders of the Manchu dynasty. The
palace buildings are empty, and the grounds neg-
lected, though there is a small army of Manchu
soldiers, police, and servants about. The beau-
tifully lacquered walls and floors, the roofs of
many-colored tiles; and many treasures, such as
jewelled weapons and richly embroidered gar-

THINGS JAPANESE 513

ments, red lacquer ware, carved ivory, jade and
bronze, are still to be seen. I was told by a
fr/end, recently from Peking, that the buildings
here were as elaborate as those in Peking. To
us, with our test of comfort, palaces whether in
Japan, China, or Korea look barren, cold and
stiff, however clean and polished and delicately
ornamented they may be.

Much more elaborate are the tombs of these
gentry than were their homes. A broad avenue
paved with large blocks of stone, and lined on
each side with huge lions, horses, elephants, and
griflSns in stone, leads to the tombs, with their
pagoda-roofs, the edges tilted up, as though
architecture had taken to the foppery of brushing
up the ends of its mustaches. In one of them
was a stone tortoise of enormous size, on which
was a tablet with the virtues and accomplish-
ments of the deceased graven thereon.

The next day I attended a banquet given in
honor of the anniversary of the Japanese Red
Cross Society. We assembled in an anteroom,
Japanese officers and officials, the Manchu
governor of the province, mandarins in their
short coats with long sleeves, and their bell-
shaped helmets with different-colored horse-hair
plumes, and there we were served with tea and
cigarettes, and made profound bows to one

514 THE WEST IN THE EAST

another. Later we marched out in procession
to the music of a really first-rate Chinese brass
band, through a crowd of five or six hundred
guests. On a raised platform, with some ten
Chinese and Japanese officials, I sat, looking,
I trust, as solemn as they. There followed
speeches, the Manchu governor lifting his robes
and taking his manuscript out of his right boot-
leg when he was called upon; and there was
much applauding and much shouting of Ban-
zais. After this we sat down at long tables to a
luncheon, supplied with dozens of dishes, some
of them very elaborate, and accompanied with
generous amounts of champagne. We had been
at it for three hours when the real performance
began, with dancing and sword-play and sing-
ing on a stage in front of us. It was evident that
the governor was bored by these rather tepid
amusements, and even I was but mildly inter-
ested. He called an officer to his side, who
thereupon whispered a word in the ear of the
Japanese presiding officer, and to my horror,
but to my intense relief, he arose in the middle
of the performance, and followed by his officers
and attendants, stalked out of the grounds, got
into his carriage, and left. With admiration for
his coolness and courage, I turned my back upon
the Japanese performer on the stage who was

THINGS JAPANESE 51.5

just then standing upon one leg, holding fans in
her teeth, her hair, her hands, and between her
toes, and followed the yellow gentleman out. It
was all done quietly, with dignity and ease; and
the Japanese bowing and scraping as he left,
made him appear all the more the gentleman of
the occasion.

That night, on a sleeping-car built by the
Pullman Company, drawn by a locomotive built
by the American Locomotive Company, I left
Mukden for Kharbin. In the dining-car the
next morning I had a capital breakfast. At
Chang-Chung, where we arrived at 6 a. m., the
Japanese control of the railway line ends and
the Russian control begins. At eleven o'clock
the Russian train with Russian soldiers, guards,
and conductors rolled into the station. The
Russians looked enormous, as they stepped off
the train, beside the Japanese officials from the
other train. One of them carried a sword as
long as the Japanese station-master. After these
many months I was in the hands of white
men again. It is hard to explain or describe
the positive delight one experiences. I can only
say I was tempted to shake hands with them all.
At half-past eight that night we arrived at Khar-
bin. They call Kharbin the Paris of the East!
It only shows how completely the point of view

516 THE WEST IN THE EAST

dictates opinions. The streets are badly paved,
the mud thick and mucilaginous; the hotel,
except for the redeeming feature of the fresh
caviare, dirty and uncomfortable; but it is a
white man's town!

The houses and shops are solidly built of
stone and brick, the permanent buildings are
for the living, not exclusively for the dead; the
horses gallop and trot; the men gesticulate,
and their display of energy and go in fifteen
minutes would be exercise enough for an Indian,
a Korean, or a Japanese for a month. They
drink vodka and eat meat, and the physical ex-
travagance, after the listless physical economy
to which I was becoming accustomed, is like a
breath of fresh air. There are dancing and
singing and clinking of glasses and bursts of
laughter in the cafe chantant in the hotel
restaurant in the evening; men shake hands
heartily and slap one another across the shoul-
ders; applaud loudly the rather poor perform-
ances on the stage, but they are alive and like it !
I am alive too, and I like it. I like the ups and
downs of it; the strain and stress of it; the dis-
appointments and the surprises; the laughter,
and the love, and the hearty friendships; and
the enmities and the prejudices, and the blows
given and received; the triumphs and disasters;

THINGS JAPANESE 517

the frank pushing and battling to get the most
out of life; the detestation of death and decay.
I do not want the legions to thunder past while
I plunge in thought again. I want to thunder
past with the legions. Let the milksop tell you
that there should be no racial prejudices, no
patriotism, no exclusive love of your own, no
radical and profound belief that the world be-
longs to those who take it, and that you are one
of the takers; that there is no East, no West;
but the moment you step across the line between
the East and the West, you shake yourself, rub
your eyes, and find yourself the West's own
child again.

It was ten days across Siberia from Kharbin
to Moscow, and I suppose the journey is slow
and tedious. Indeed that question has been
put to me more often than any other perhaps;
"How was the trans-Siberian journey?" I
dare not answer. To me it was comfortable
and exciting, for I was on my way home!

CONCLUSION

A YEAR in the Far East has not converted
me to any belief in my own omniscience.
These sketches of conditions there, are
intended to furnish material to my countrymen
for drawing their own conclusions, as I have
drawn mine.

First of all we must rid ourselves of the as-
sumption that we are called upon to impose our
religious and moral codes upon the East, if need
be by an armed crusade; and to follow this by
dictating to the East the commercial and mili-
tary lines along which they shall be permitted to
develop. The days of the missionary-citm-gun-
boat policy have gone by. They have gone by,
not because the Western lust for the land and
trade of the East has lessened, but because the
East has grown strong enough to put a stop to it.
We were not converted to charity toward the
East by obedience to the tenets of our religion,
but by Kuroki's guns at the Yalu River. Let us
be frank and admit it. The East scents some-
thing more than mere religious fervor in our solic-
itude for their moral and religious welfare, and

5ia

CONCLUSION 519

notes that more leagues of territory have been
taken from her than leagues of progress have
been made in converting her. The assumption
of moral superiority has been accompanied by a
very commercial demand for payment, not in the
things of the spirit, but in the things of the flesh.
"Doth the wild ass bray, when he hath grass ?"
The only book every Westerner knows is an
Eastern book. Eastern from cover to cover.
Eastern in its modes of thought. Eastern in its
images. Eastern in its belief in autocracy. East-
ern in its belief in the subordination of women,
Eastern in its occasional pictures of gross im-
morality. Eastern in its lazy gentleness. Eastern
in its unconscious cruelty. The West accepts the
Bible as its best literature. Even in the matter
of material possessions, the East is still our
teacher, and those Orientals, the Jews, are our
most powerful bankers. The enlightened among
the Orientals, therefore, and though they be few
in numbers, they rule, claim that they have
given us enough to prove that along spiritual
lines they are not in our debt; and further, that
their consent should be asked before we force
them to accept the mechanical and material
mould we call progress. We have assumed
superiority because we could enforce it; our
superiority has not won its way by conversion

520 THE WEST IN THE EAST

along peaceful lines. Japan was driven to mar-
tialism to defend herself from China, then from
Russia, and then from the demands of all Eu-
rope and America for extra-territoriality for their
citizens.

If we take the high moral ground, therefore,
that we must force our code upon them by foul
means or fair, they ask why we do not first con-
vert the agnostics of France and Italy, the so-
cialists of Germany, and the avowed unbelievers
in those countries and in America and the British
Empire. Further they make reply, that a cen-
tury of effort along those lines has accomplished
practically nothing. India, China and Japan
are no more at heart Christian to-day than an
hundred years ago ; and they claim that the first
light of equality and fair-play came to them
from the flashing sword of Japan. The sword,
not the cross, delivered them.

They recall that privileges were extended to
the missionaries in China by a contemptible ad-
dition, surreptitiously made, to a French treaty,
and signed by the Chinese before it was discov-
ered. They recognize that we would not per-
mit a Confucian teacher to rail against religion;
a Shinto priest to spread his doctrine of "Fol-
low your natural impulses and obey the Mikado's
decrees"; a Hindu prophet of Sivaji to foment

CONCLUSION 521

discord among us in the West; and we shall find
as time goes on, and as extra-territorial privileges
lessen, as they have ceased entirely in Japan, that
we shall be more and more held to account for
the doings and preachments of our missionaries.

I mean this not in the least as derogatory to
the work of these men and women, for I know
of nothing more courageous, patient and self-
sacrificing than the work some of them are doing.
I mean merely that the East is growing strong
enough to resent dictation upon this or any other
subject. Now that they are strong enough to
make their resentment dangerous, we can no
longer force ourselves upon them. In our at-
titude toward the East we must take up new
ground; as the strategists say, take other posi-
tions. Our authority and superiority are no
longer to be taken for granted.

It is a pretty problem, this, of our suddenly
altered relations with the East. The chief diffi-
culty lies in the fact that our great democracies
of the West must necessarily be governed by the
uneducated, the superficial, and the untravelled.
Nothing is haughtier than savage ignorance,
nothing more opinionated than racial prejudice,
nothing more difficult to deal with than that
narrow uprightness which expresses itself in
downrightness. In our domestic affairs these

522 THE WEST IN THE EAST

things rub against one another, and the angles
of diflBculty are smoothed out, and in spite of
many hitches and some disasters, the people
work out their salvation without thought of war,
at any rate.

But as a nation dealing with another nation,
the way to the solution of such problems is more
delicate and more diflScult. We are apt to fall
into the error of choosing as our representatives
to other countries, either men who demand office
for services to a party, or men whom we think
will hustle the East for trade privileges. One
is as bad and as provocative to misunderstand-
ing as the other. The trade ends should be
in the hands of professional traders, but the
diplomatic representation ought to be in the
hands of the cultivated and of the intellectually
enfranchised; those who believe, with Goethe,
that "to know the world and not to despise it is
the end and aim of culture." It is hard to make
the business West understand that this is the
type of man most respected, better understood
and of more value to us, than any other in the
East, where they are suffering, not as the un-
travelled believe, from ignorance, but from over-
cultivation. Much that is new to us is old to
them. One nation cannot know another as a
nation knows itself, and unless the few who do

CONCLUSION 5^3

know other nations are heeded when they ad-
vise, the suburban sages, by their stiff self-
satisfaction and their profound ignorance of,
and contempt for, any basis for society except
their own, may make amicable relations dif-
ficult. The ultimate decision, even of great
questions of international policy, is in the hands
of the voters in the West. The overwhelming
majority of these know nothing of history, and
have no historical perspective; they know noth-
ing of the traditions and prejudices of the East,
they are contented with the sheltered snobbery of
suburban sectarianism, and they are, to a man,
persuaded, as a consequence of this, that any
civilization other than their own is unworthy even
of investigation.

The diflFerence between the way in which
Western peoples as a whole represent the East
to themselves, and the real East, is much like
the difference between the "Faust" of Gounod
and the real "Faust" of Goethe. The one is
melodrama for the mob, the other is philosophy
understood by a small minority. The one is all
tears and terror and namby-pamby morality,
gesticulated and shrieked by an obese soprano,
with a traditional braid of straw-colored hair
down her back, and a bulky tenor; the other is
a subtle analysis of the most puzzling contradic-

524 THE WEST IN THE EAST

tions in human life. In the one the devil, all in
red, with hoofs and horns and tail all plainly
showing, is a silly tempter, invented by a cos-
tume-maker; in the other, Mephistopheles is a
shadowy metaphysical creation, who remains to
this day one of the unsolved mysteries of litera-
ture. The West pictures the East as an easily
understood Marguerite; only a few know that
the East is Faust.

There was no danger in this attitude in the
past — unless it be always dangerous to be a com-
placent fool — because we were too strong to be
punished for our folly. Our self-righteous in-
eptitude was safe. This is no longer the case.
I am no believer in the folly of the day that Japan
proposes to attack us immediately; but I can
assure my countrymen that we should have a job
on our hands which would tax us to the utmost,
did we undertake to punish Japan for a slight to
our dignity. In a word, the relations between
East and West have changed.

Hitherto the Eastern problem for the white
races has been merely a consideration of how
much territory they would take; how much in-
demnity they would demand ; how much of their
ethical code and religious preferences they would
impose; and what demands they would make
for the commercial and industrial security and

CONCLUSION 5^5

activities of men of their own race in the East.
Now the problem is slowly shaping itself to mean :
how much must we give in return for what we
take; and how can we arrange matters to keep
the East out of the West, while at the same time
securing free access for the West in the East.

We in America, for example, declare that the
whole southern half of the western hemisphere,
an enormous tract of valuable land, thinly popu-
lated, is within our sphere of influence, and not
open to Chinese, Indian, or Japanese settlers;
at the same time we ridicule the talk of war.
Can anything be more deplorably self-satisfied,
ignorant and illogical! Even that most peace-
able of men, George Herbert, knew, and wrote:
"You cannot get beyond danger without danger."

I am not a pleader nor an advocate. I have
attempted in this volume merely to give material
for a readjustment of our views of the East; but
I defy any American to show me how we can
get beyond the danger of the Monroe Doctrine,
how we can get beyond the dangers of persistent,
and often aggravating, attempts to impose our re-
ligious and moral codes upon an indifferent and
suspicious Eastern population, without the dan-
ger of a powerful navy. Not even Yankee in-
genuity can get beyond danger without danger!
Our selfish, thoroughly un-Christian and topsy-

526 THE WEST IN THE EAST

turvy logic, which preaches peace in India, China,
Japan and Korea, and then proclaims dire pun-
ishment upon any one who attempts to share in
the opportunities of the golden West, has gone
unchallenged thus far, only because we were
too powerful to be taken to task. But this is
"exposing the unguarded heel" indeed!

The almost universal belief in the West, that
we are admired, envied, and looked upon as
superior by the East, and that our type of civi-
lization is the goal toward which the East is
striving, is not only ludicrously false, but is at
the bottom of our misunderstanding of the whole
situation. No Indian prince, no Chinese manda-
rin, no Korean courtier, no Japanese noble en-
vies, admires, or looks upon us individually or
nationally as superior. As for the masses of the
people, their attitude is a mixture of dislike and
contempt.

Do we not see the existing differences between
Germans and Frenchmen, between the English
and the Irish; even in our own country, differ-
ences between the man from New England and
the man from South Carolina, and the cleavage
between the negro and the white man? Why
not apply the rules we do know to the peoples
we do not know ?

These natural racial antagonisms are planted

CONCLUSION 527

in us, for what purpose we know not, and they
are hard for the best of us to overcome. We
may have personal friends who are Indian,
Chiuese, Japanese — I now have many, I am
glad to say — but we should not like our sisters
and daughters to marry them. Turn this the
other way, and we have the attitude of the East
toward the West. Eight hundred millions of
people in the East either ignore us or suspect us
and dislike us, and when I write "us" I mean
the whole West. There are, of course, a minute
few who speak and understand a European lan-
guage, and who have travelled, but they are
least of all converted to our ways or our ideals.
They admit our superiority in one respect only:
that we can throw bigger broadsides of lead and
iron; that we can spend more on gunpowder
and dynamite; and that we are better organized,
martially and commercially, than they are. The
Japanese war with Russia has led them to believe
that even this superiority is open to question,
and passing, not permanent.

Of our great divisions of peoples, the Russians
are the most sympathetic to them, the English
the most respected, the Germans most distrusted
(particularly in Japan), the Americans the least
known and considered, in the East.

British rule in India is the greatest blessing

528 THE WEST IN THE EAST

and the most splendid service ever rendered to
one people by a stranger nation. Unrest is not
new in India. Many people seem to think that
there were peace and harmonious interests in
India before the British took control. The
readers of these pages will discover this error.
The continuous unrest of centuries is only now
whipped anew into froth by a subtle use of re-
ligious and racial prejudice, in order to stiffen
the demand of India for the Indians; the real
meaning of which is India policed by the British,
for the benefit of the Brahman hierarchy and
the Babu.

There are no signs to-day that India can of
itself throw off or rid itself from British rule.
That may come, but only through the moral
and political demoralization of the British at
home; and a war which will so engage her
whole strength that she cannot hold India from
a combined attack from the outside, assisted by
the Indians inside. Even that calamity would
only mean India controlled by Russia or Japan,
or by some arrangement between them for a
sphere of influence there. India is no more for
the Indians, than is Korea for the Koreans, for
ages to come.

There is greater danger to the present benev-
olent control of India from London than from

CONCLUSION 529

Bengal. If political socialism is to have control,
with its doctrine broadly stated that all success
is per se suspect and personal prowess to be re-
warded with no quarter, then we shall all be
delivered into the hands of the Yellow Peril and
the Brown Peril.

I have dealt at some length upon the situation
and conditons in India, because British predomi-
nance in the East is, after all, our first Eastern
question. Great Britain saved us from our great-
est danger in our war with Spain, by declining
to listen to overtures, made to her by the Euro-
pean powers, to intervene in behalf of Spain.
Our lamentable unreadiness and blundering,
were only saved from disaster by the weakness
of our foe. Had Europe demanded that we
cease firing and submit the matter at issue to an
European court, we would have been as impo-
tent to refuse such an order as was Japan after
her war with China, when all the spoils were
taken from her.

Japan learned her lesson, and in ten years
made herself strong enough on land and sea to
take again, and to keep, the Liao-tung peninsula
and southern Manchuria. For years to come,
even at the breakneck speed she is working
now, the control, settlement, and exploitation of
this new territory will absorb all her energies.

530 THE WEST IN THE EAST

Nothing but some almost unthinkable affront to
her dignity from our unwary national ignorance
can divert her attention to us. She has nothing
to fear from us. She is beating us out in the
race for the Pacific carrying trade, and she will
soon have all the machinery for a similar suprem-
acy in China. I am not a believer in the per-
manent achievements and control of any Eastern
race ; and I find no arguments except of a hypo-
thetical sort to bolster up, much less to prove,
such a thesis; but I am bound to admit that
Japan, whether permanently or not, has become
a factor to be considered in all international
problems of the day.

China is far more puzzling than either India
or Japan. The Chinese are the independent,
virile, and mentally superior race in all the East.
To the Westerner it is inconceivable that power
should not wish to express itself, that ability
should not wish to proclaim itself, that force
should not wish to stamp its will on others. It
is just because the Chinese are the most Ori-
ental of the Orientals, the stanchest believers
in themselves, that this fitness to prevail, and
this inertia, exist side by side.

The East is spiritual, the West secular. The
East still obeys spiritual beliefs, the West obeys
only so far as it is convenient and consistent

CONCLUSION 531

with personal independence and comfort. In
the West secular law is above the Church, in
the East spiritual faith is above the law. The
West looks forward to personal consciousness
even after death, as witnessed by our belief in
immortality; the East seeks loss of conscious-
ness, and looks upon reincarnations as punish-
ments. The East abhors impersonal law and
its cold neutrality, and loves personal autocratic
rule. Most of the best things of the West —
honesty, justice, mercy, impartiality and sym-
pathy — the East dislikes, and would rather be
without.

The East is fatigued and disgusted by the
rules, demands, exigencies of the social inter-
course of the West. To be on time, to answer
letters, to pay visits, to dress at certain times, and
in a certain manner, to be severely accurate in
money matters, to do day after day certain pre-
scribed duties, the Oriental shrinks from as from
slavery; and even though persistent painstaking
bring prosperity, he will not drive himself that
far. This accounts for the fact that the East
submits to cruelty, to conquest, flood, and famine,
to being trampled to death by elephants, buried
alive in a wall, cut to pieces while alive, and to
infanticide on a colossal scale. He will exert
himself tremendously on occasion, he will fasten

532 THE WEST IN THE EAST

his will upon some object of vengeance or pos-
session, and hang on till death; but he must be
free to choose his own time and place. Regu-
larity seems to him, of all things, the worst
tyranny. His patience is monumental, because
his whole creed and philosophy of life teach
that what he wants must come, and that it is
better to wait for it than to strive for it. I be-
lieve the power of accomplishment throughout
the East, and particularly in China, is tremen-
dous ; but they will not exercise it at the cost of
mechanical persistence. Symptoms of a similar
kind we find in our own race. Men capable of
the most tremendous mental and moral labor
seem to be mentally and physically torpid at
times. They shrink from any exertion whatever
as from pain. ' I see no signs that these broad
differences are lessening. Japan whipped into
exertion by maltreatment has armed herself, but
even Japan rests what she has accomplished
upon quite other moral and religious sanctions
than ours.

What, then, is to be our attitude; what the re-
sults of the increasing intercourse between West
and East? Either the English and the Ameri-
cans, to speak only of our own case, believe their
own civilization is superior to that of the people
they govern, and that therefore they have a

CONCLUSION 533

righteous cause in keeping them subordinate,
or they are mere plunderers. If they have this
faith they are bound to defend themselves from
Indian, Japanese, or any other civilization that
they consider dangerous to their own, whether
in their dependencies or at home.

We should not boast nor bluster; nor should
we seek peace by hanging the halter of defence-
lessness about our necks, with the end dangling,
as an invitation to pull us into war. We may
maintain our preferences at home, but we may
not enforce our prejudices abroad, is about the
stage at which we have arrived. Internationally,
we must now live "answerable lives," not only
because the East is growing powerful enough to
demand answers, but because as our knowledge
of other peoples increases by speedier means of
intercourse, sympathy ought to increase as well.

No successful imperialism is possible to a
nation of men who are without charity, without
toleration and without recognition of their own
ignorance and limitations. They must strive
for an intellectual magnanimity, which enables
them to detect the good in manners, morals,
governments and beliefs, built upon traditions
worlds apart from their own. They must not
be turned aside from the responsibilities of gov-
erning and protecting the alien races in the de-

534 THE WEST IN THE EAST

pendencies they control by that sentimentality
of the day which twists truth to make traps for
fools. They must not be led astray by the temp-
tations to immediate gain and the temporary
defeat of a commercial rival by the "drummer"
diplomacy which a selfish industrialism would
foist upon them. The man who only watches
his feet is quite as likely to stumble as the man
who is looking at a distant steeple. The future
as well as the present, then as much as now,
must be kept in mind. No nation ever lost
anything, not even its trade, by holding to high
ideals, and by insisting upon them for its ser-
vants. Only thus can the West give a confident
"No" to the question being asked in the East:

"Is civilization a failure.
And is the Caucasian played out.''"